Adapted from an epic novel into an equally epic film, this is a Hoffman vehicle that sees the actor gallop through endless guises like an extended audition tape.

| Jan 17, 2024

What makes this message picture succeed is its comedy, which Hoffman and the fine supporting cast handle so well. Penn makes us laugh instead of cry, even though blood runs like water.

| Nov 10, 2023

The '70s has its first great epic. Blood brother to the 1903 one-reeler, The Great Train Robbery, Little Big Man is the new western to begin all westerns.

| Nov 10, 2023

You wind up disappointed, wishing you'd liked it better. It goes wrong in a subtle way -- the wrongness seeping into your bones, so that when the movie is over, you don't really feel like talking about it.

| Nov 10, 2023

Leaving aside the question of Penn's altering the tone of the movie according to who is being slaughtered, I question the artistic and political ethics of building up the desire for revenge in the audience.

| Nov 10, 2023

Little Big Man. an action-packed, wide-screen, family entertainment, is more... well, damn it, human than any movie of comparable eight-figure size. Never mind the horse-filled vistas. That's why it provides such a thumping good time.

| Nov 10, 2023

Penn has made a tangy and, I think, unique film with American verve, about some of the grisly things that American verve has done.

| Nov 10, 2023

Little Big Man is a big, flashy comedy... Possibly because Dustin Hoffman appears in it with a characteristically engaging, not to say marvelous performance, it has some of the artificial rightness about it that The Graduate did.

| Nov 10, 2023

One minute, I was smiling at the antics of Dustin Hoffman and his fellow actors; the next, I was annoyed. There were also moments when I was simply bored; for the film is far too long.

| Nov 10, 2023

An important movie by one of our most interesting directors. It is also one of the maybe half dozen American movies of this year that won't make you ponder the possibility of a subsidy plan to pay film makers not to work.

| Nov 10, 2023

It's the Old West from a brand new viewpoint -- a tall tale told with beauty, a quirky sense of fun, compassion and frequent outrage.

| Nov 10, 2023

Although the movie is not quite the first in which the Indians are allowed to win a battle, it is surely the first in which they get most of the good lines.

| Nov 10, 2023

[Director Arthur Penn and his screenwriter Calder Willingham have] tried -- on the whole pretty successfully -- to reproduce Berger's balance between authentic observation, social criticism, bizarre fantasy and mordant humor.

| Nov 10, 2023

Tighter editing would have been a big asset. Hoffman's fans, however, will not be disappointed.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 10, 2023

In the end, by seeing the Indians as men and women and children rather than as a Culture or a Historical Force, Penn's Little Big Man states the tragedy of the confrontation more eloquently and powerfully than any other recent films.

| Nov 10, 2023

Little Big Man, a movie created on a broad scale, is an example of what an epic film should be. Mixing morals and sight gags, history and fiction, humanism and genocide, and it requires of an audience that it be appreciated as a sprawling yarn.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 10, 2023

If the film fails somewhat in the arc of Penn's ambition, it is, nonetheless, quite remarkable, and not simply because of Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance.

| Nov 10, 2023

George gives a performance of such natural dignity and warmth that he and his character will live on in the mind and the heart for a long time to come.

| Nov 10, 2023

What Penn achieves in Little Big Man is a mock-epic tall story, a picaresque adventure of the 18th-Century scope and moral repercussions like Voltaire's Candide.

| Nov 10, 2023

Little Big Man is my choice for the best-of-the-year honors. No film is perfect; this one damn nearly makes it.

| Nov 10, 2023