It remains genuinely unnerving to this day -- ridiculous in places, faintly despicable in others, but gorgeous to look at and possessed with a sense of absolute, ruthless gravity.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 12, 2024

Perhaps the most influential American horror movie ever made, The Exorcist was a Rorschach test when it came out. Fifty years later, it still sticks with us.

| Oct 6, 2023

The scariest movie ever made...

| Sep 30, 2023

Friedkin performed a similar alchemy to that of Francis Ford Coppola [with The Godfather]: He took a good, pulpy novel and turned it into a great, enduring movie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 29, 2023

The Exorcist has dated little, and its essential premise makes it still one of the most modern of horror films. The monster isn't lurking out there. It resides in us, even in the most banal vessel imaginable, a sweet schoolgirl.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 29, 2023

It is carefully constructed, filled with nuance, designed to build fear one minute at a time. There can be no escape, no break, just the horror unfolding before your eyes.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 29, 2023

Spewing from Blair's 12-year-old mouth via McCambridge's distressed larynx, the script's sexual obscenities are shocking enough to accomplish the virtually impossible and restore the potency of the four-letter word.

| Sep 29, 2023

Where previously it was an appalling subversion of good taste, subtlety, exposure to Ouija boards and the Catholic stigma of divorce, it now seems clumsy and adolescent.

| Sep 29, 2023

It's still jolting. It's great shock theater.

| Sep 28, 2023

The dismissal of The Exorcist as sheer exploitation sells the themes of faith and family short. Besides, manipulative or not, it still stands as one of the most truly horrifying films ever made.

| Sep 28, 2023

It's still the same old schlock -- a deeply cynical, morally corrupted, often utterly senseless work that has somehow been raised to the status of greatness.

| Sep 28, 2023

A 132-minute jump scare – with horribly malign slow sections – taking place in upper-middle class America rather than some exotic central European locale.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 28, 2023

It is a genuinely shocking movie, which in its ferocious strength and bloodcurdling events denies any possibility that what we are witnessing is anything but a titanic struggle between God and the Devil.

| Sep 27, 2023

The Exorcist is a stunning movie. It is not a pretty movie, and it will repel some, but it hits with explosive force, reveals Jason Miller to be as fine an actor as he is a writer, and is a moving, powerful drama.

| Sep 27, 2023

Whatever you may think of the story, you should recognize Friedkin's masterful staging of it. The Exorcist is a spellbinder because Friedkin creates the experience of evil and sustains it for two hours. That's an incredible feat.

| Sep 27, 2023

Frankly, The Exorcist is nothing but a superior shocker. A very well-made horror movie, with pretensions to something better (or certainly deeper) that never does more than stick its nose out and then hastily withdraw.

| Sep 27, 2023

If The Exorcist isn't the thinking-man's horror movie we were expecting -- congratulate Friedkin for keeping us thinking when the chill is on.

| Sep 27, 2023

The movie is a startling mix of religion, ESP, frenzy, fervent hope, occultism and a heavy-handed dose of diabolism. But don't mistake it... The Exorcist is slam-bang sensationalism. It is an exhaustive, as well as an exhausting shocker.

| Sep 27, 2023

The sign of the Devil is all over the film, which survived strange troubles in the two years of its making to emerge as a creation of infernal inspection -- cunning, shocking, obscene, outrageously bold and immorally spellbinding.

| Sep 27, 2023

A great many people will feel both frightened and sick. My own reaction was one of first irritation and then anger that a filmmaker of Friedkin's resource should lend his talent, and that of a good cast, to something so essentially meretricious.

| Sep 27, 2023