It’s about as realistic a depiction as West Side Story, but Coppola tells the story with a moving sympathy and romance.

| Jan 11, 2025

Uniquely and stunningly overdramatic, The Outsiders is turned by Francis Ford Coppola and his cast, against all odds, into an incredibly engrossing picture.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 8, 2025

The Outsiders - The Complete Novel becomes a stronger film because of Coppola's decision to restore deleted scenes and give the film a new score and soundtrack.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 26, 2023

This overwrought, stylized teen melodrama might only hold your interest if you were young enough to be impressed by it in 1983.

| Original Score: C | Aug 30, 2022

The movie has aged well, and today impresses on all counts. The story and characterisation are intelligent and play-like, the camerawork is interesting, and the acting is sensitive and involving.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

The deep, honest emotion undercutting the performative toxic masculinity of these young men is beyond charming and vitally essential, but the melodramatic randomness of the plot ultimately lost me.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 22, 2021

What particularly sells this pensive if occasionally overwrought melodrama is the amazing collection of then-rising stars.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 21, 2021

This begins as a great film but, unfortunately, slowly gives way to ever weaker melodrama across its second half. Well worth it, though, to see the beginnings of so many notable careers and for Stephen H. Burum's cinematography.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 29, 2021

It's beautifully shot, written and paced, but the cast, really, is the thing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 15, 2021

The movie is sincerely anguished, sensitive to class. It can also wobble alarmingly.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 14, 2021

It is a movie with the heartfelt old-fashioned urgency of a Hollywood film from much further back, with the Brat Pack in this film the equivalent of the Dead End Kids who made Angels With Dirty Faces in the 1930s.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 14, 2021

[A] surprisingly sweet, earnest and vulnerable in a way that from some angles could be considered cloying, but ultimately succeeds in capturing the overwhelming and all-encompassing emotions of adolescence.

| Apr 27, 2021

Because of his sentimentality, Coppola misses the opportunity to reflect more vigorously on the life of these teenagers. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Feb 5, 2020

Watching it again recently I found all of Coppola's cornball flourishes to be rather endearing, even generous.

| Jul 31, 2018

In The Outsiders, the director's class is consistently present, but it may be a case of the wrong man for the job, since overall film plays unevenly, with a cliche and detached ambiance that robs the plotline of what passion it might've whipped up.

| Mar 27, 2018

One of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art's-sake films in Hollywood's history, a faux-naf Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame before being snuffed out in their prime.

| Aug 2, 2015

A satisfying example of the artist-as-talented-hack.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 25, 2014

Ultimately, "The Outsiders" feels like two movies awkwardly thrown together - one a tough-acting antiseptic to the sanitized-suburbia Spielberg fantasies that ruled the era's box office, the other a besotted valentine to widescreen epics of old.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 5, 2013

Francis Ford Coppola's cheesy, overblown adaptation of S.E. Hinton's wonderful novel captures none of the book's gritty magic.

| Original Score: 30/100 | Jul 12, 2011

Coppola's take on S.E. Hinton's classic. Teens+.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2011