The pacing can feel a bit lax, but the movie's eclecticism is remarkable.

| Aug 21, 2021

Blue Collar offers up the bitter, outrageous, and ultimately despairing vision of anti-union efforts that the subject deserves.

| Aug 21, 2021

Schrader depicts the exchange of labor for money as a kind of original sin, and not even those who honor its code-to the letter and in spirit-are innocent.

| Aug 21, 2021

The movie is affecting as a social portrait as well as a psychological drama.

| Aug 21, 2021

This works both as unrelenting drama and as black comedy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2021

Paul Schrader's directorial debut is an unexpectedly gritty working-class melodrama set in Detroit.

| Aug 21, 2021

"Blue Collar" is a gritty, hard-driving movie and one that, for all its flaws, is not easily forgotten.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 21, 2021

It doesn't have the ring of box office success, but it makes a valid and kind of roughly eloquent statement about brotherhood and the working man.

| Aug 21, 2021

In "Blue Collar," Paul Schrader has fashioned a powerful film from the anger of the powerless.

| Aug 21, 2021

The lead actors, all three of them, are marvelous, working both with and off each other in performances of great integrity.

| Aug 21, 2021

Schrader apparently sees the world as populated by battered and brooding souls. He draws their portrait so well in pictures like "Taxi Driver" and, now, "Blue Collar," that you reluctantly have to admit that he may be right.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 21, 2021

It is, as they say, not a pretty movie. It's a rough one. And, in its horror, it also offers Pryor, Keitel, and Kotte the best roles each has ever been awarded.

| Aug 21, 2021

"Blue Collar" is a dazzling display of funky realism, street-smart humor, and paranoid melodrama.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 21, 2021

"Blue Collar" is an impressive exhibition of some of the newer talents in movie-making: Pryor, Keitel, Kotto and particularly Paul Schrader, who at barely 30 seems headed for a major directing career.

| Aug 21, 2021

After a season of warmly bland, if stylish and entertaining movies, Paul Schrader's "Blue Collar" arrives like a welcome jolt, a breath of fresh arrogance at the end of a polite, slightly dull party.

| Aug 21, 2021

Schrader's visceral writing and direction illuminate "Blue Collar" in the manner of chain lightning in a darkening summer sky.

| Aug 21, 2021

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 16, 2018

Paul Schrader's directorial debut is an artistic triumph.

| Mar 26, 2009

Very probably the most clear-sighted movie ever made about the ways that shopfloor workers get [screwed] over by 'the system'.

| Jun 24, 2006

The center of the film... is Mr. Pryor who, in "Blue Collar," has a role that for the first time makes use of the wit and fury that distinguish his straight comedy routines.

| May 20, 2003