Metacritic reviews

Ultracool.

This 1973 feature is one of the finest examples of action montage from its period, a dynamite piece of work.

Marvellous, toughly eccentric thriller which confirmed that Siegel had more responses to '70s paranoia than a mere Magnum blast, and decisively removed Matthau from the wasteland of Neil Simon wit.

A low-key, tough little thriller punctuated by casual bursts of brutality and deadpan humor, Charley Varrick is informed by a quiet professionalism that suits a movie about feds and criminals doing their jobs, whether that means laundering money, making fake passports, or robbing banks.

Charley Varrick is a sometimes-fuzzy melodrama but so well put together that it emerges a hardhitting actioner with a sock finale.

A very well made caper film full of action and rich with character.

Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson -- the '70s' three reigning American action movie superstars -- had their thunder stolen when top action director Siegel cast rumpled, baleful-eyed comic sourpuss Walter Matthau in this classic '70s thriller. [09 May 1999, p.C9]

Walter Matthau has a field day with the title character: a crop duster/bank robber who bills himself as "the last of the independents" - and runs circles around a Mafia killer (Joe Don Baker). [07 Mar 1996, p.F3]

Siegel has decorated the movie with a lot of colorful bit characters including a chatty, sex‐obsessed old woman, but the action sequences give the film its content as well as style.

It's noisy and brutal, with sentimental flourishes.