Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

bbbalson 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.

liebezeit06 i had seen this film when first released in early 85. though the pacing is slow and deliberate i find myself hypnotically fastened to the visuals aided by a good john lurie score. this is one of the few films i've seen where the long lingering visuals (fulton fish market scene,etc),in its unflattering documentation of a bygone nyc era, actually adds the sense of smell to picture. i could actually taste/smell times square while watching.there has been enough written about the plot/theme in others comments. though i find it an ambiguous film in that the character of christine's awakening of alternative sexual desires seems to leave her more frustrated than fulfilled.the pacing reminds me in a good way of wim wenders early b&w dramas.could someone please inform me though if that British accented woman at the bar is an uncredited gina birch of The Raincoats??i grew up during that period in manhattan, especially around the sleaze of times square. so i may be simply nostalgic in an odd sense when i watch the film.

howie73 The combination of Kathy Acker as writer and Bette Gordon as director should have signaled a potent brew, but sadly what we get here is a brilliant idea cut down savagely by the film's low-budget budget. Tracing the seedy, crime-ridden porn theater world of Times Square in the early 80s from a what was a post-feminist perspective should have pushed the boundaries of what could be explored in feminist cinema but here the effect is to disengage the viewer from the convoluted action. Every technical aspect from the sound to the acting feels shabby and weak and frankly underwhelming but there is an underground post-Factory (Warhol not WalMart) passion at work that just about saves this oddity. Acker's polemical script presents feminist intervention/investment in the patriarchal world of pornography with some gusto and ambiguity at times but eventually the direction dilutes itself in a haze of revisionist sexual politics, thanks to the inconsequential scripting and unfocused lensing.

tocchan 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.