Fat City is about our need for companionship in the face of life’s ongoing adversities.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 23, 2022

Boxing serves as an apt metaphor about fighting for survival under Capitalism with few resources or any real sense of hope.

| Original Score: FOUR STARS | Mar 3, 2022

You have to get dinged around a bit by life before you can make a movie like 'Fat City', a film that dwells in disappointment without making a big deal about it.

| Jan 14, 2022

With Leonard Gardner adapting his own book and John Huston sitting in the director's chair, Fat City adheres closer to real life than reel life, painting a portrait of a downtrodden existence not only among the have-nots but among the never-will-haves.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 19, 2020

The fight sequences are the best I've seen. But it is the acting, the feeling for character, which makes this film so extraordinarily different.

| Jan 3, 2020

In addition to the splendid cinematography, along with the songs that animate the soundtrack, the acting is outstanding. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Jul 23, 2019

Huston rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a camera, and dived head-first into Gardner's unapologetic pessimism...what resulted was one of the finest films of his career.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 28, 2018

A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston.

| Jan 10, 2018

The movie's bleak, but it's funnier than most comedies, and it suggests that life's toughness doesn't preclude joyfulness.

| Nov 17, 2015

So you say to yourself, this Fat City is pretty damn realistic, even if you know in your heart that "realistic" and Hollywood should not be printed on the same page-otherwise paper ignites. Still, you're marveling at it.

| Jun 17, 2013

Huston and his performers give the material an elating, transcendental verve, especially during the sequences in which words fail the characters and interminable silences take over.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

A terse, sharp, downbeat but compassionate look at the underside of smalltown American life in the west.

| Jan 29, 2010

Both an extraordinarily realistic look at the bottom rungs of the fight game and a moving exploration of the human condition.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 29, 2010

The movie is crafty work and very much a show. In one way or another, right down to the percussively abrupt open ending, it's all about being hammered.

| Sep 15, 2009

Fat City is most notable for terrific performances all around, especially those of Stacy Keach, Susan Tyrell, and a baby-faced Jeff Bridges.

| Original Score: 61/00 | Aug 30, 2009

Grim and downbeat, John Huston's superlative drama about a bunch of losers in Stockton California is splendidly acted by Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, and particularly Susan Tyrrell in a well-deserved Oscar nominated turn.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 4, 2009

Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 7, 2005

The downbeat sports drama is a marvelous understated character study of the marginalized leading desperate lives.

| Original Score: A | Feb 2, 2005