“‘Year of the Dragon’ offers little comfort, and when it does, Cimino heavily suggests its victories are hollow and insincere. It is a dark-mirror exercise in genre fragmentation that shatters the vigilante cop thriller into thousands of pieces and lays its ugliest instincts frighteningly bare.”
“‘The Deer Hunter’ encapsulates a commanding representation of a precise period in American history, a precise location and precise types of men — somewhat clichéd, yes, but remarkably representative.”
“There has always been a conflict at play in Nicholson’s screen presence: between ‘Nicholson’ and ‘Jack.’ The desire to be taken seriously and the lure of the riotous Jack persona have always done battle across his decades of stardom.”
“Throughout much of his 60s work, Imamura often examined the balance between ordinary and unordinary people, and in The Profound Desire of the Gods, he finds an exceptional way of highlighting the extremity of this concept.”
“La vallée is not an entirely successful film, largely because of its limp energy and problematic ideological frameworks. It is, however, intensely bizarre and a fascinating portrait of a particular time and place.”