Ishtar‘s slow-but-steady descent into complete tedium is triggered by a progressively tiresome midsection focused on the protagonists’ far-from-enthralling spy shenanigans...

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 27, 2024

Plays its humor much more straight than the Hope/Crosby comedies, which may explain why it never connected with audiences, but it's that deadpan nature that really makes it work.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 24, 2024

Ishtar must have started as a small idea. Unfortunately, only the budget grew.

| Mar 29, 2023

An elaborately antic musical of startling, even disturbing, originality.

| Nov 21, 2022

Terribly handsome (as shot by the great Vittorio Storaro), sleekly entertaining, usually amusing, and sometimes flat-out hilarious.

| Sep 12, 2022

What works about the film is the shared sense of artistic yearning.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 23, 2022

It seems too many people participated to save the unsalvageable. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Jun 16, 2020

The film fails at every level.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Mar 19, 2019

It is a smart, generous, genuinely funny affair. Sometimes, like the camel who almost ambles away with the picture, it's longish in the tooth, but it is based on an extremely astute vision of life.

| Mar 19, 2019

There are three or four memorable sequences in Ishtar -- the purchase of the blind camel, the use of fake Arabic in an auction scene, and the first horrendous singing performance of stupid songs. But the film lacks pace and consistent tone.

| Mar 19, 2019

Reasonably genial and diverting.

| Mar 19, 2019

Ishtar is cute, reasonably pleasant entertainment, but no motion picture oasis for Hoffman, Beatty or their fans.

| Mar 19, 2019

Ishtar is a good movie, but you can't help but wonder if, lurking somewhere in those cans of outtakes, there isn't a great movie, too.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 19, 2019

This Elaine May comedy was the most underappreciated commercial movie of 1987. It isn't quite as good as May's previous features, but it's still a very funny work by one of this country's greatest comic talents.

| Mar 19, 2019

Beatty goes along with the casting joke of playing the nerd sidekick to Hoffman's slick loverboy. But zany antics aren't his forte. Hoffman's impishness serves the film better until the sheer weight of the production grinds him down

| Mar 19, 2019

Though far from a masterpiece, the movie is often hilarious in a sly, seemingly improvisational way.

| Mar 19, 2019

One of the grossest miscalculations of the blockbuster era.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 19, 2019

An incredible box office loser and, to be frank, far from great, Ishtar is still not nearly as awful as many would have it.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 19, 2019

So is the film merely a misunderstood messenger from God, or is it really just a barren desert of blind camel jokes?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 26, 2019

It's a film that resists categorization, staking a claim on a weird, absurdist territory of its own. For that, in the maddeningly generic landscape of '80s multiplexes, it was crucified. Now it's celebrated. And rightfully so.

| Jun 8, 2017