A treasure of the 1970s...

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 22, 2025

It offers a pessimistic portrait of the American dream that finds itself on the dirtiest highway, but never finds its rhythm and wastes the dramatic potential of Pacino and Hackman when it tends to park on the roads of banality. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Oct 14, 2022

...the picture’s impact is heightened considerably by the engrossing and persistently captivating efforts of its stars...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 3, 2022

The film is strong, in every sense of that word.

| May 25, 2021

From the stunningly composed opening scene... "Scarecrow" emerges as a film that takes over where "Midnight Cowboy" and "Easy Rider" left off.

| May 25, 2021

Gene Hackman and Al Pacino are wonderful, flexible, yeasty actors who make even the most trivial dialogue come alive, but their work in Scarecrow is too sophisticated for the film to support.

| May 25, 2021

"Scarecrow," principally because of the Hackman-Pacino tandem performance, has a kind of soiled, slum-charm...

| May 25, 2021

It isn't often a performance is really worth the price of admission, but if you can allow for Pacino, I think you'll find Hackman's work in "Scarecrow" to be that good.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 25, 2021

Thanks to an ingenious performance from Gene Hackman, "Scarecrow" commands more attention than its meandering and fundamentally pointless narrative deserves.

| May 25, 2021

Intelligent, raucously funny, startling, continuously interesting, and quite affecting.

| May 25, 2021

Maybe some day we'll progress past the point where the "seriousness" of a film is determined by the moroseness of its finale, as though the audience must pay penance for the laughs during the comedic moments.

| Jan 2, 2020

For too long a stretch, it is simply the story of two men going nowhere, which goes nowhere itself, despite the fine acting of Hackman and Pacino.

| Jul 22, 2019

Jerry Schatzberg's film embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 16, 2013

Hollywood movies have rarely spoken such tough and tender truths.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 14, 2013

The best film in Schatzberg's small but interesting oeuvre.

| Apr 28, 2013

A poignant tale of lost souls from a golden age of US cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 26, 2013

As a picture of blue-collar America the film is credible and compassionate.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 26, 2013

This is a jewel of American cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 25, 2013

This is no lost classic, but Pacino/Hackman superfans could do a lot, lot worse.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 25, 2013

With its two peerless leads delivering riveting performances, this snapshot of the landscape of early 1970s America - external and internal - is a fine entry into the road movie canon.

| Apr 24, 2013