Pauline Kael

"It has a distinctive and surprising spirit. It's funny, delicate, and intense -- all at the same time."

"Good-natured, full of verbal-visual jokes, and surprisingly entertaining"

"There's a total absence of personal obsession - even moviemaking obsession - in the way Crichton works; he never excites us emotionally or imaginatively, but the film has a satisfying, tame luxuriousness"

"A private-eye movie without sophistication and style is ignominious."

"It's all plot, and the plot is all holes; it's not just that it doesn't add up right - most of the episodes don't quite make sense."

"The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place."

"A funky, buoyant farce"

"Perhaps the most simple and traditional and graceful of all modern Westerns."

"Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn't come off at all."

Directed by Alan Parker, the movie takes itself inordinately seriously as a moral fable expressing eternal truths. It feels morose and unrelieved, despite the efforts of the two actors.

"It's intended to be a thriller, but there's little suspense and almost no fun"

"The film is honest and watchable. But, unlike Orton, it takes no real delight in misbehaving."

"Consistently entertaining and eerily beautiful."

"Grandiloquent masochism of the kind an adolescent boy might fantasize. With rain outside and and smoke inside, this Chicago-set movie is almost a parody of film noir."  

"Tamara Jenkins hits on a visual style that perfectly reflects her script's endearing juxtaposition of wackiness, sweetness, and sorrow."

"So inept you can't even get angry"

"The film is faithful to Irving's vision."

"Directed by George Cukor, this movie has an unflagging pace, but it's full of scenes that don't play"  

"Hal Ashby directed this intuitive yet amorphous movie, which falls apart when he resorts to melodramatic crosscutting."

"It's a detached, opaque, affectionless movie; since it doesn't regard the young prostitutes as human, there's no horror in their dehumanization--only frigid sensationalism."