The film remains a beguiling time capsule—sensual, cerebral, both ode to and threnody for a very specific time and place.

| Mar 4, 2025

It’s easy to see why Performance has both attracted and offended.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 2, 2025

Unfortunately the film is mostly about the gangster, who lacks Jagger’s charisma and generally is no fun. And then the self-consciously disorienting style makes it even harder to care about what is happening.

| Sep 18, 2023

Critics hated it, and Warner Bros. barely saw fit to release it, but Performance has endured as a cult favorite. It's also arguably the greatest-ever big-screen showcase for Jagger...

| Nov 26, 2018

... this collision of London gangster machismo and drug culture, where "Nothing is true; everything is permitted," is unmistakably a product of the sixties.

| Nov 25, 2018

With a pleasurably peculiar cast of James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Performance is one of the weirdest slices of Seventies London around, combining gangster violence and ritual humiliation with decaying rock-star glamour.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2015

For all its hallucinatory excesses, however, Performance is a film of ideas, even if it's happier to let them swirl around than attempt to explain them.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 7, 2014

Pop stars continue to have bad luck in films.

| Mar 25, 2013

This hallucinogenic deconstruction of identity writhes with sex, substances, ultraviolence and good ol' rock'n'roll.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 25, 2013

Visually dazzling, finely acted investigation into such diverse matters as identity, sexuality, violence, power, and underground culture in late 1960s London.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 25, 2013

The movie is a facile enough pastiche of underground pyrotechnics and Euro-art pretensions, but far more evocative now is the fast, offhand repartee between the principals.

| Mar 25, 2013

It put Roeg's powerful cinematic style on the cultural map for the first time.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 25, 2013

Rapture and boredom both seem valid responses.

| Mar 25, 2013

[VIDEO] "Performance" pioneered a slew of modern cinematic techniques adopted by such master filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, and Gaspar No.

| Original Score: A+ | Apr 18, 2011

Comes across as pretentious in spots but has not lost its '60s hallucinogenic suggestiveness. It haunts like the dream just out of reach of the rational concrete.

| Aug 19, 2010

A grand Borgesian hall of mirrors

| Mar 15, 2010

It's not so much a linear story of one man's adventures as an enquiry into the nature of performance, gender and the very structure of society.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 26, 2009

Em sua estria como ator, Jagger surpreende pela intensidade e expressividade, ao passo que Fox, um intrprete j consagrado poca, impressiona pela coragem em protagonizar um filme que retratou como poucos a insanidade da Londres daquele perodo.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 10, 2009

A strangely mesmerizing, innovative film whose artistic stature has increased largely due to its absorbing look at British crime and art worlds circa 1968, and riveting turns by Mick Jagger and James Foxx who exchange personalities in this tale.

| Original Score: B | Sep 21, 2008

We were always building monuments to our power and we always will be--performance is just one avenue to that same old immortality.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 26, 2007