Rarely have I seen a movie so drenched in persuasive style and ambience soar so brilliantly above its trappings to emerge as a first-rate, captivating entertainment.

| Nov 21, 2023

[Ridley Scott's] strength is visual and his genius is economy. The Duellists is said to have cost well under $2 million, but it has every millimeter the same feeling of period that Barry Lyndon had with more pace and vitality.

| Nov 21, 2023

If it is sometimes irritating and occasionally hollow, The Duellists remains a very viewable achievement.

| Nov 21, 2023

The story might have worked if there was an undercurrent of attractiveness to Keitel's loutish character. But he is an unwavering boor from start to finish, and his prowess with weapons is in no way redeeming.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 21, 2023

The film's strength is in its quietness. It never tries to barnstorm or swashbuckle its way through a story that could so easily look as if it had leaped from the pages of Classics Illustrated.

| Nov 21, 2023

The Duellists translates the narrative into meticulous images, and makes a serviceable adventure yarn out of it. What is basnet is the irony of Conrad's telling.

| Nov 21, 2023

The fact is, we never know what motivates them. They're like robots whose futile clanging eventually becomes an absurd, exasperating, comical exercise.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 21, 2023

Though the film suffers from a sluggish narrative, it is well-played and visually brilliant -- beautifully composed and stunningly photographed -- and a must for film lovers.

| Nov 21, 2023

Overall, the lavish mixture of painfully slow pictorial scenes, historical authenticity, and a few interesting duels never coalesce into an effective pattern.

| Nov 20, 2023

Leaves one with the feeling of having been in a gallery rather than a cinema. It has the still beauty of a Gainsborough painting, but it is so obsessed with how it looks that it loses contact with what it is trying to say.

| Nov 20, 2023

Scott and photographer Frank Tidy seem more concerned with light than with character development.

| Nov 20, 2023

The Duellists is Scott's first feature, but it reflects a forceful as well as masterly command of settings, lighting and composition. Pictorially, this is the most evocative period movie since McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

| Nov 20, 2023

The problem here is that the principal characters are as silly surely as the code, surely an effect not calculated by director Scott.

| Nov 20, 2023

Both [Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel] look uncomfortable surrounded by all the period trappings, and their flat, listless performances eventually blunt whatever small impact The Duellists might have had.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 20, 2023

The richness of Scott's visuals, the excellence of the performances and the depth of the themes combine to make a minor masterpiece.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 3, 2012

Scott gets strong performances from his supporting cast (Quick is sensual and effective) and is able to salvage the movie through the alchemy of the striking visuals.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 3, 2012

Keitel is jaunty and menancing and Carradine more determined and a bit troubled but also caught up in this strange need of one to prove honor and the other slaking a twisted nature.

| Oct 18, 2008

Keitel struggles gamely against a wooden Carradine, but the American influences further dislocate a script that delivers little observation, psychological or social, on their running feud.

| Jan 26, 2006

It is precise, intelligent, civilized, and because it never for a moment mistakes its narrative purpose.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 20, 2003

The film comes closer to working than it has any right to, given the curious casting (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) and director Ridley Scott's inability to sustain dramatic tension or build a coherent scene.

| Jan 1, 2000