There’s something elemental about the movie’s boys’ adventure machismo, a primal force that overpowers Cimino’s more cartoonish flourishes.

| Nov 22, 2023

Michael Cimino’s tale about the physical, emotional, and psychological impacts the Vietnam War had on a group of friends remains one of film's ultimate masterpieces. Very few movies have ever captured the unsparing aftermath of war quite as devastatingly.

| Jun 8, 2023

... Perhaps a little cumbersome, but it’s hard not to get caught up in the film’s big, sentimental sweep.

| Nov 29, 2022

It grabs you by the lapel and says, "Call me masterpiece!"... These weaknesses are The Deer Hunter's greatest strength -- because, in a year of timid moviemaking, they trumpet the film's daring to fail at being great.

| Sep 7, 2022

Graphic in its depictions of war and peace, honest in its capturing of human emotion, Deer Hunter is an epic that avoids political points to stress the basic needs we all share.

| Aug 30, 2022

Robert De Niro reclaims his title as our finest young dramatic male star in a devastating anti-war epic.

| Aug 30, 2022

In terms of sheer impact, this is the best movie of 1978; it restores power and urgency to the screen.

| Aug 30, 2022

So many of the elements are so good that it all adds up to a pity. Someone, or more than one -- writer or producers or director or editor or all -- fogged up about why this picture was being made and whether it was on the rails.

| Aug 30, 2022

A film to be debated and argued over seriously because it is an earnest, serious and impressive work, despite the reservations it is necessary to have about it. In a thin and evasive year, The Deer Hunter joins a thin company that aspire to greatness.

| Aug 30, 2022

The Deer Hunter might have been a superb document of the devastation to human lives caused by the Vietnam war... But director Michael Cimino allows the story to drag on past three hours, with endless scenes of male camaraderie and war atrocity.

| Aug 30, 2022

Despite its faults, The Deer Hunter is a formidable work which asks a great deal of its audience. The graphic brutality of the Vietnam scenes are devastatingly rendered, and it is a pulverizing experience.

| Aug 30, 2022

It is a flawed but important movie, both as a work of art and for what it has to tell us about ourselves.

| Aug 30, 2022

There is no denying the impact of the film, but it should've been twice as harrowing in half the time.

| Aug 30, 2022

Far from achieving Tolstoyan heights, however, Cimino fails even to attain a Scorsesian or Coppolian level. The structure of the film is so rickety, and the details so incongruous, that whatever feelings were intended finally peter out.

| Aug 30, 2022

The combat scenes are painfully graphic and, while it concludes on a hopeful note, The Deer Hunter remains an emotional thunderbolt which is apt to send you out of the Opera House Cinema in a state of profound cinematic shell shock.

| Aug 30, 2022

This movie has qualities that we almost never see any more -- range and power and breadth of experience, all fully sustained throughout three hours of film that leave us exhausted and satisfied by the end.

| Aug 30, 2022

This unwieldy film batters its audience; perhaps this is the painful catharsis which American audiences want.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 30, 2022

The Deer Hunter is a film of great courage and overwhelming emotional power, a fiercely loving embrace of life in a death-ridden time. And it places the director-writer-producer, 37-year-old Michael Cimino, right at the center of our film culture.

| Aug 30, 2022

The actors are so natural, so real, so privately panic-stricken in the face of death, that their performances ride rough-shod over the technical situation and bring to it an intensity and vitality.

| Aug 30, 2022

The acting ensemble is what carries the sheer force of this movie to its nerve-wracking heights. De Niro captures the minute essence of his character and ignites the screen with a sharp-edged realism that it as once frightening and inspiring.

| Aug 30, 2022