Yes, it's a good movie, a very good one; no, it's not precisely Ken Kesey's novel... It's almost as if the saga of Randle P. McMurphy were a historical incident reported novelistically by Kesey and filmically by Forman, each in a distinctive style.

| Feb 25, 2025

While Milos Forman has made a frightfully mindless film, he's made it damn well -- cloaking Kesey's irresponsible pap in trappings of immediacy and legitimacy that aren't easily stripped away.

| Feb 25, 2025

About midway through the film, two things happen, transforming a facile tract about the repressive society into an honest polemic.

| Feb 25, 2025

Most of the characters are thinned out... But Forman directs his players superbly, and Louise Fletcher as the nurse turns impassive coolness into a destructive force.

| Feb 25, 2025

As for Nicholson, he is nothing short of miraculous.

| Feb 25, 2025

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a bruising film -- boisterous, unflinching, sometimes ugly. Yet it is tempered with a quiet humanity, a genuine regard for people and their impossible predicaments.

| Feb 25, 2025

Nicholson does a lot of things very well, and has much charm, but he just isn't elemental enough. As for Louise Fletcher, the Mattie of "Thieves Like Us," she is a fine, expressive actress, but wrong for Big Nurse.

| Feb 25, 2025

It is a finely made film, perhaps the most honest to date to deal with the inmates of a mental hospital... And it may well be the vehicle to win Jack Nicholson his long-deserved Oscar. But its subsurface rewards are minimal.

| Feb 25, 2025

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest can be compared to All the President's Men or the conspiracy film Capricorn One in how it challenges the system. Low-key and understated, this film is powerful in ways that cut to the core of the human condition.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 28, 2024

A rare screen adaptation of a beloved novel that maintains the emotional and dramatic power of the original while establishing its own distinctive approach to the story...

| Aug 19, 2023

Adapted from Ken Kesey’s novel of the same name, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is an electrifying observation of the need for reform in our mental institutions.

| Jun 8, 2023

[Jack Nicholson's] certainly never been better than in this superb black comedy about life in an asylum.

| May 9, 2023

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is still one of the most forward-thinking and emotionally complex films about oppression and people’s rights as it relates not just to mental illness but to society as a whole.

| Apr 21, 2023

A very young Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd and Brad Dourif all appear in great supporting roles.

| Feb 10, 2023

It is a political film... I mean political in the sense that it is about power, about ideological tyranny, and behind its façade are all the Solzhenitsyns who didn't get out.

| Aug 8, 2022

Every vice and virtue is explored with humour and compassion in this masterly film. Altogether, an unforgettable experience.

| Mar 9, 2022

Under the skillful direction of Milos Forman, and with Jack Nicholson in the "heroic" lead, "Cuckoo's Nest" attains its greatest power in the medium of film.

| Mar 9, 2022

Kesey's story was hardly designed to be naturalistic, and Forman's streamlining isn't the way to make it work (there may not be any way). As it stands, Forman has merely reduced the story without successfully revising it.

| Mar 9, 2022

It is Jack Nicholson, an actor continually producing profound and stunning performances, who fires a life in McMurphy different from, but not lesser than, Kesey's character. This is a milestone performance.

| Mar 9, 2022

I found the ending, with its heavily rigged tragedy and trite metaphors, neither believable nor very moving... [But] in its better moments, [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest] is hilariously and potently effective.

| Mar 9, 2022