The Conversation doesn’t offer neat resolutions. Its famous ending is a haunting tableau of paranoia consuming itself, leaving the audience, like Caul, surrounded by questions. It’s a film that demands reflection, provoking debate decades after release.

| Original Score: A | Apr 28, 2025

... a thriller directed in a minor key, with a richly textured soundscape of silence and ambient noise broken by hushed voices and electronic interference and a visual style that suggests a man alienated from the rest of the world.

| Apr 26, 2025

The Conversation is one of the great paranoia films of the 1970s in the era of Watergate.

| Apr 4, 2025

What made “The Conversation” so remarkable was how it humanized the expert, a plain, unassuming, easy-to-forget man named Harry Caul, brilliantly portrayed by the late Gene Hackman.

| Original Score: A+ | Apr 4, 2025

editing and sound mixing used to perfection

| Jan 18, 2025

As pure thriller, The Conversation works masterfully, slowly involving the audience in figuring out its secrets, and it works on a second level as a moral tale, a study in guilt, regret and loneliness.

| Jan 11, 2025

To call The Conversation a thriller alone is about as accurate as calling Hamlet a revenge melodrama. Ideas ripple the surface of the film like tremors in disturbed water.

| Sep 24, 2024

Hackman is quietly magnificent -- so real in emotions you feel that if you touched the screen you would feel the flesh of his face.

| Sep 24, 2024

Coppola has delivered in one neatly tied package a near cinematic masterpiece, a work which could not be transformed, without great loss of effectiveness, to the stage, the printed word, or any other art form. 

| Sep 24, 2024

It is a superior movie, a dynamic social document, and an exemplary public service. In every way, a Kilimanjaro among motion pictures.

| Sep 24, 2024

The Conversation is driven by an inner logic. It's a little thin, because the logic is the working out of one character's obsession, but it's a buggy movie that can get to you so that when it's over you really feel you're being bugged.

| Sep 24, 2024

Coppola never lets us in on any of the tactical details. Obviously, he opts for surprise over suspense, but even his surprises are muffled by his solemn gaze.

| Sep 24, 2024

This is a screenplay of the first quality, written with the eerie foresight of a real writer. It is very simply directed. Nothing gets in the way of the intended double meanings of the script.

| Sep 24, 2024

The story is well told, and it is tricky. But as good as it is, the narrative takes a back seat to Hackman's superior performance and to the film's disturbingly somber mood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 24, 2024

The Conversation can have cost no more than a slight fraction of The Godfather, but it is a powerful and important picture, ominously fascinating in the wiretap age.

| Sep 24, 2024

I feel that Coppola has partially botched the thriller, but the film is a triumph none the less -- gritty, complex, idiosyncratic, a rare case of freedom used rather than squandered.

| Sep 24, 2024

The character is so superbly written by Coppola that this probably would have been a memorable film even if Gene Hackman hadn't played Harry. But Hackman does, in a performance that will make you forget his Popeye Doyle.

| Sep 24, 2024

An example of moviemaking at its worst and best. And the negative aspects far outweigh the positive.

| Sep 24, 2024

In his brilliant new film The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola has captured one excruciating aspect of contemporary ills as no other filmmakers have ever done before him except Antonioni.

| Sep 24, 2024

The Conversation is a fascinating film, in which Hackman delivers his best performance to date.

| Sep 24, 2024