Still, this was the greatest of the screen Gatsby's until Baz Luhrmann's glossy 2013 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio came along.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2025

Anyone in search of the true Gatsby, man or myth, will be hard put to find more than a portentous and elliptic recitation of excerpts from the novel, illustrated by minor dramatizations and major tableaux: little more than a game of living statues.

| Sep 24, 2024

Faithful, almost reverent adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age romance, aided by superb costumes, sets, music and photography and harmed by Jack Clayton's slow-moving direction and the uneven performances.

| Sep 24, 2024

It’s a striking assembly, many creating individual moments that linger in the memory—yet somehow they never gel as an ensemble.

| Apr 1, 2024

The film was acknowledged as a technical triumph -- it won Oscars for its costume design and Nelson Riddle’s scoring -- yet dismissed on most other counts. Yet I’ve always had a soft spot for this third film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age tome.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 8, 2023

The settings are magnificent and most of the performances [are] very good.

| May 5, 2023

It's all very glittering, but where's the gold, the true gold?

| Jul 10, 2019

To a short, sleek novel like Gatsby, where the slight action moves forward like a capricious swimmer, nothing could be more destructive than the slow pace and top-heavy lavishness and overexplicitness.

| Feb 10, 2019

The folly of the film, lies, I think, in the damage done to the character of the narrator.

| Mar 2, 2018

Clayton is so obsessed with respecting the story that he turns it into a museum piece; you see the actors going through the paces of dramatizing a classic, rather than finding the heartbeat underneath.

| Jun 21, 2016

It is not a great film: but in capturing so much as a glimmer from the iridescence of the original, it becomes well worth seeing.

| Mar 11, 2015

Perhaps it was my lack of expectations that caused me to be pleasantly surprised.

| Mar 3, 2015

'70s adaptation is visually stunning but emotionally distant.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 30, 2014

[VIDEO ESSAY] Widely trashed by a cabal of critics who didn't know a good film when they saw it, Jack Clayton's 1974 rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel beautifully captures its romantic essence and caustic social indictments.

| Original Score: B+ | May 9, 2013

The film is faithful to the letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel but entirely misses its spirit.

| Mar 6, 2013

It all gets rather tedious watching other people enjoy themselves, although a colourful recreation of the period that stays faithful to the novel makes the film easier to bear.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2013

In sum this picture is a total failure of every requisite sensibility. A long, slow, sickening bore.

| Mar 6, 2013

The color is rich, the photography superb, and the atmospherics of the roaring twenties are realistically and stunningly in evidence in this film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece novel, but that's it.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 26, 2007

The Francis Coppola script and Jack Clayton's direction paint a savagely genteel portrait of an upper class generation that deserved in spades what it got circa 1929 and after.

| Jul 26, 2007

Director Jack Clayton seems overawed by the opulence of the production as well as by the mythic presence of Fitzgerald -- and the result is a film of shimmering surface brilliance and almost complete lack of focus or substance.

| Jul 26, 2007