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

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

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

[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

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] isn't the most profoundly cinematic film of the year, but it may well prove the most entertaining.

| Nov 10, 2023

If he is not already, Arthur Penn as of Little Big Man becomes the most creative, perceptive, balanced, and broadly credible student of American working in film today.

| Nov 10, 2023

Hoffman is superb. In concert is a genuine, dignified, touching, sage and humorous delineation by a septuagenarian Indian, Chief Dan George.

| Nov 10, 2023

A pungent and episodic piece of Americana which defies pigeonholing.

| Nov 10, 2023

There's this to be said for Little Big Man: watch the movie long enough and, sooner or later, you'll see something you like... [But] director Arthur Penn has not been able to pull this picaresque yarn together into a satisfying whole.

| Nov 10, 2023

A pity about some of the film's earlier miscalculations, but Arthur Penn is very evidently a big man, and in that context a few little miscalculations do not matter all that much.

| Nov 10, 2023

Hoffman's triumph could have been anticipated, but the marvellous performance by Chief Dan George is a revelation. It has a patriarchal dignity blended with a complex sense of irony about his own image.

| Nov 10, 2023

Displays the hitherto unrevealed range of Dustin Hoffman's talents as the 120-year-old narrator who recalls his frontier living, and -- wonder of wonders -- presents an authentic Indian chief in the role of an Indian chief: Dan George, a superb actor.

| Nov 10, 2023

The best of this rambling work -- in fact, the majority of it -- is good; either uproarious or intriguing, shocking or poignant.

| Nov 10, 2023