If the function of art is to help an audience feel less alone, then Five Easy Pieces succeeds beautifully.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2019

A very modern film. Elliptical, absurdist, harshly humorous, convulsively lyrical.

| Nov 18, 2017

Director Bob Rafelson attempts something unusual here, making a film that's subtle about its meaning without ever ranging into the pretentiously oblique or merely ambiguous.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 1, 2015

The flaws of this acutely self-conscious 1970 road picture grow more obvious with every passing year, but so does its passion and eloquence.

Full Review | Jul 18, 2014

The movie has more anger than it knows what to do with; that's its fascination and its weakness, too.

Full Review | Jun 16, 2014

This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 16, 2014

A key turn-of-the-decade film, with Nicholson railing against waitresses and barking at noisy dogs as Rafelson observes seedily picturesque roadside America.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 16, 2014

The landscape photography of Lszl Kovcs is a minor marvel, while the sound design is an intelligent complement to the sonorities evoked in the film's title.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 16, 2014

Nicholson makes it all go. He proves he is more than a "character actor" with many scenes, especially the confrontation with his father.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 18, 2013

The movie is best known for a classic tell-off in a diner, but watch Nicholson's eyes as he says it. The man is damaged and needs help

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

It's not a particularly subtle film, but it is a magnificently insightful and engaging one, flipping effortlessly from icy realism to heated melodrama while always maintaining a darkly comic, at times quietly satirical undercurrent.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 24, 2010

It's a great work of the Discover America Seventies.

| Feb 23, 2010

The film's nervewracking quality is consistent with its content. Nicholson's performance is a remarkably varied and daring exploration of a complex character, equally convincing in its manic and sober aspects.

| Jul 26, 2007

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

| Jul 26, 2007

The result is less a story and more a collection of incidents and character studies, all of which inform each other and extend our understanding of Nicholson's mode of survival: flight.

| Jan 26, 2006

Rafelson is expert at supporting this movement, and the film proceeds from scene to scene with a quiet competent modernism that bespeaks quality, but that more often begs than provides expression.

| May 21, 2003

We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 25, 2003