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

| Nov 21, 2022

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

Reasonably genial and diverting.

| 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

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

| Mar 19, 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

If Ishtar has a personal stamp, it's not in what it has to say about Reagan-era militarism, but in what it has to say about collaboration, and how well-meaning people can goose each other to greatness-and folly.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 6, 2013

Desert sequences provide some of the film's high points as Beatty and Hoffman finally develop some genuine rapport under adverse conditions.

| Sep 3, 2008

So bad it could almost have been deliberate. The faults are many, but the casting of Hoffman and Beatty as a talentless and tacky cabaret duo is fatal.

| Feb 9, 2006

The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired.

| May 20, 2003

Ishtar is an unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously.

| Jan 1, 2000

Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Ishtar doesn't attempt enough to be considered a magnificent failure. It's something far less substantial; it's piddling -- a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs.

| Jan 1, 2000