This picture sounds realistically profane and has a dark, grainy surface, and by Hollywood standards, it's strong, adult material, but the mechanism is a vise for our emotions -- the mechanism is schlock.

| Sep 21, 2023

Add immaculate casting, a noteworthy debut for cinematographer Michael Chapman, and a spare and subtle score by Johnny Mandel, and you're left with a gem of a film.

| Oct 2, 2019

Meadows' 1st beer(s), 1st joint, 1st sexual experience, 1st attempt at assertiveness... represent not just a concentrated and expedited coming-of-age narrative, but also an elegy for a nation's broader loss of innocence in its military excursions.

| Feb 27, 2017

Nicholson's cigar-chomping, profanity-spouting grunt is one of the greatest incarnations of stunted machismo onscreen, and he's brilliantly complemented by Quaid's picture-perfect awkwardness and Young's bracing cynicism.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 3, 2013

The film has an engagingly profane, scruffy looseness, a hallmark of Hal Ashby and Robert Towne's careers, that undermines the conventions of the narrative.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 2, 2013

A tough-talking, sparely directed effort by Hal Ashby, with an immaculate performance by Jack Nicholson.

| Oct 31, 2007

Salty, bawdy, hilarious and very touching.

| Oct 31, 2007

One can't help feeling that the criticism of modern America hits out at all too easy targets in a vague and muffled manner.

| Feb 9, 2006

The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 9, 2005