The story’s simple; what’s complex... is its tragicomic tone: Director Arthur Penn channels the social unease of the ’60s through these folk heroes of the ’30s, allowing the counterculture to indulge a violent fantasy of social rebellion.

| Original Score: A- | Feb 7, 2025

“Bonnie and Clyde” saved American cinema

| Sep 10, 2024

An exciting, sometimes gruesomely humorous play on violence.

| May 1, 2024

Depression-era America is a dust bowl of photogenic desperation; the savagery of Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree is only slightly disarmed by the gallows humour of the screenplay.

| Jan 2, 2024

If it's possible for a film's ending to feel at once ambiguous and definitive, Bonnie and Clyde leaves the viewer feeling torn apart without necessarily knowing why. Its mix of lyricism, brutality, and ambivalence...

| Apr 29, 2020

A few years ago, Truffaut, Godard and the Nouvelle Vague stole the gangster film from America and gave it new blood. Now Penn has taken it back home where it belongs, and in so doing has found a match for his temperament.

| Mar 18, 2020

A hybrid, an ambivalence, an alternation of achievements and collapses, an attempt to have both ways something not clearly enough seen in either.

| Aug 10, 2016

Destined to be among the year's most discussed, honored and profitable.

| Aug 14, 2015

Bonnie and Clyde don't really know that killing kills. The film does -- unlike the run of movies about violence now, which mostly know that killing sells.

| Jan 14, 2013

Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.

| Aug 30, 2012

Considered New Hollywood's moment of arrival, tipping square critic Bosley Crowther into retirement (The New York Times, they were a-changin').

| Nov 12, 2008

Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off in all directions and ends up full of holes.

| Aug 22, 2008

Stylistically, Arthur Penn's crime epic doesn't do anything that hadn't already been seen in any number of runty, skuzzy teen epics, all of which firmly established the paragons of good (i.e. "The Law") as being the new antagonists.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2008

Funny and violent, knowing and chilling, this is the template that no lovers-on-the-lam movies has ever bettered.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 17, 2008

It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films... but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style.

| Jul 2, 2007

This inconsistency of direction is the most obvious fault of Bonnie and Clyde, which has some good ingredients, although they are not meshed together well.

| Jul 2, 2007

With its weird landscape of dusty, derelict towns and verdant highways, stunningly shot by Burnett Guffey in muted tones of green and gold, it has the true quality of folk legend.

| Feb 9, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 20, 2004

It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 20, 2003

So definitive in so many ways, Bonnie and Clyde has become a 20th-century touchstone.

| Mar 10, 2003