The whole thing is short on imaginative resonance; what it has is the Brackett-and-Wilder specialty -- a distinctive cruel (and sometimes cruelly funny) edge.

| Jul 28, 2022

The Lost Week End is magnificent melodrama, a serious study into a disease which too often is delineated in ridiculous guise, and an absorbing attempt to show the misery of drink.

| Feb 3, 2022

If Ray Milland doesn't get the Academy Award for his work in The Lost Week-end it will be a miscarriage of justice.

| Feb 3, 2022

Jane Wyman, who plays Don's troubled sweetheart, is a revelation in her first dramatic role after her unbroken succession of featherweight comedy parts.

| Feb 3, 2022

Ray Milland makes the central figure hateful, likable, and somehow understandable. His portrayal is a masterpiece of superb control, versatility, and sensitivity.

| Feb 1, 2022

Whatever may be one's individual reaction to this sordid story of a dipsomaniac's five-day debauch, there is no gainsaying that The Lost Weekend... is a movie masterpiece when considered both as to its daring story and technical treatment.

| Feb 1, 2022

Compliments must be handed out to the entire supporting cast for acting jobs far above the average in sincerity and power.

| Feb 1, 2022

Few details of this alcoholic nightmare are scamped; and the film must certainly rank among the great ones of our time.

| Feb 1, 2022

Ray Milland is fully equal to the heavy demands which it makes upon him as the central character. He suggests the charm which may persist into the depths of degradation.

| Jan 31, 2022

The Lost [Weekend] is a fascinating, horrifying, and quite honest picture of a few days in the life of a hopeless alcoholic.

| Jan 28, 2020

The "curse of the drink" was never more vividly dealt with than in The Lost Weekend.

| Apr 22, 2019

One of cinema's earliest and best portraits of drug addiction.

| Feb 19, 2013

Under Wilder's imaginative direction, Milland has been able to convey just what an uncontrollable craving for liquor does to a man's mind, his body and soul.

| Feb 23, 2012

Director Billy Wilder's technique of photographing Third Avenue in the grey morning sunlight with a concealed camera to keep the crowds from being self-conscious gives this sequence the shock of reality.

| Feb 17, 2009

Painfully sincere and uncompromising look at alcoholism for a film released in 1945, with a superb central performance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 20, 2008

It is intense, morbid -- and thrilling. Here is an intelligent dissection of one of society's most rampant evils.

| Feb 20, 2008

Today it's less impressive but not without its virtues.

| Dec 12, 2006

What makes the film so gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally stripped of all glamour.

| Feb 9, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2004

A shatteringly realistic and morbidly fascinating film.

| May 20, 2003