Jonathan Rosenbaum

"It's extremely competent (...) and though it kept me absorbed it failed to win me over."  

"[Boorman] makes very photogenic hay out of all the allegorical possibilities, with the help of cinematographer Conrad Hall and scriptwriters Alexander Jacobs and Eric Bercovici"  

"The film looks dated today, but interestingly and revealingly; and it shows a kind of originality and verve that has been Boorman's stock-in-trade from the beginning."  

"The results are leagues ahead of Joseph Strick's unfortunate Joyce adaptations, but inevitably leagues behind the original story."  

"Along with 'The Man Who Would Be King' and 'The Dead', this is arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his very best film"  

"Either you like this movie a lot or you run screaming for the exit; I find it rough going"  

"[It] was scripted mainly by Jean-Paul Sartre (...) The film benefits from Douglas Slocombe's black-and-white photography and an excellent secondary cast (...) it suffers from Sartre's dogged and fundamentally anticinematic literalism"  

"One could have plenty of quarrels with this as an adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, but it's still one of the better John Huston films of the 50s."  

"This shows much more narrative flow and sweep than the contemporary films of Dovzhenko and Eisenstein, but it tends to look a bit more rickety today"  

"Brandauer's command as a performer and the movie's incidental glimpses of European high life in the late teens and 20s (...) make it intermittently watchable"  

"The main reason to see Alexandre Rockwell's flaky, independent black-and-white comedy (...) is John Cassavetes veteran Seymour Cassel"  

"Enjoyable but ludicrous (...) The situations are consistently cliche-ridden and outlandish, but somehow the stylish writing keeps things spinning."  

"The basic problem here is that everybody from Winkler to screenwriter Richard Price to the talented supporting cast (...) tries too hard"  

"[Winkler] glamorizes, romanticizes, and simplifies the material to an insulting degree, but despite his worst efforts, fragments of what made the original story arresting manage to leak through"  

"A stylistically graceful period piece (...) Pintilie treats [the theme] with some sensitivity"  

"Chabrol's mise en scene and his handling of the period and performances are masterful."  

"Compulsively mainstream as only 50s Hollywood could be, and never very funny"  

"Like "The Hustler," this absorbing Las Vegas story about a professional poker player (Eric Bana) uses gambling to tell a tale of moral regeneration. But Bana can't carry a picture like Paul Newman"

The results are watchable enough--sometimes funny, sometimes over the top--and fairly fresh, though also a bit calculated. Read full review

"Ed Lachman’s cinematography is letter perfect as always in its handling of light and color (...) but it’s a pity to see it wasted on such claptrap."