It may be atypical in its vivid unpleasantries, but this production isn’t particularly entertaining; its presentation of cops and crimes isn’t as original as it is merely boundary-pushing.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Feb 6, 2025

Keitel’s performance is astonishing, with the actor completely exposing himself physically, mentally, and emotionally.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 18, 2024

Even by the scuzzy standards of Abel Ferrara’s filmography, Bad Lieutenant is particularly filthy.

| Jun 5, 2024

Ferrara seeks to expose his subject. What this film is about is the performance, Keitel’s absolute bearing of his character’s soul.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 30, 2023

Always one for provocation, director Abel Ferrara pushes our empathy to — and maybe even beyond — its natural limits, only to break with the film’s hitherto unrelenting grit and dangle the glinting possibility of transcendent redemption in front of us.

| Aug 25, 2023

Keitel's performance is courageous, almost psychotic, because it is deeply and profoundly authentic.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 2, 2020

Ferrara uses this fictional piece to penetrate the corrupt soul of a dirty rotten cop when he is confronted with something more terrible than even himself.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 3, 2019

[Keitel] keeps us watching his descent without wanting to look away. Only an actor with tremendous reserves of power could accomplish that.

| Jan 8, 2019

It's a powerhouse performance in a film of jabbing intensity and wit.

| Jan 8, 2019

The greatest New York City depiction of repentance in the deepest, darkest slums of the human soul since Scorsese's "Mean Streets."

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 7, 2019

As emptily defiant as a bit of graffiti on the base of a dustbin.

| Jul 24, 2018

Bad Lieutenant generates a fascination of abominations as Ferrara drives home his message about police corruption -- with Keitel's cop as the avatar of everything sick and evil in perverted law enforcement.

| May 30, 2018

It's a movie of wall-to-wall depravity and profound spiritual longing, at once one of the dirtiest and most deeply religious pictures I've ever seen.

| May 17, 2018

This is bull of a very high order.

| Nov 13, 2017

Alongside "Reservoir Dogs" Able Ferrara's 1992 tour-de-force crime drama provides the epic showcase for Harvey Keitel's impressive acting abilities.

| Original Score: A+ | Sep 26, 2010

Ferrara was in the right place at the right time to make Bad Lieutenant.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 5, 2009

Keitel's performance is perhaps the needed counterpoint to Christopher Walken's ice-cold overlord in Ferrara's visionary crime opus King of New York

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 13, 2009

Members of the gutter-al elite will be the sole survivors.

Full Review | Apr 9, 2008

The work of a warped wizard.

| Apr 9, 2008

Keitel is onscreen for pretty much the entire movie and clearly relishes the opportunity of playing someone not so much teetering on the abyss as leaping off with a grand piano manacled to each ankle.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 9, 2008