This shallow utopia needs our hairy hero’s dose of he-manliness...

| Feb 15, 2024

…it’s lofty, ambitious, and has sparky moments of clarity that make it a noble failure…

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2023

The film is a mass of inoperative whimsies and conceits; they're imperative even on the dumbest sci-fi level, because Boorman isn't enough of a writer to make them work together.

| Sep 21, 2023

This deserves to be watched more than once for the Tree of Knowledge osmosis, jacking into their matrix insight...

| Jul 25, 2023

A lot of good ideas have gone into the complex social order Boorman, who directed Deliverance, has created; but they've all been sacrificed to the necessity of developing a plot around them.

| May 9, 2023

A sci-fi curio...a more gonzo version of Logan's Run - with Connery in thigh-high boots and a "Borat"-esque G-string - as a futuristic savage turned enforcer by the elites in power...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 10, 2020

The plot is so spectacularly offbeat that it's never boring, though it's routinely idiotic.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Aug 31, 2020

It has that homemade, backyard look we encounter so frequently in low-budget films. This is particularly damaging to a work that tries to compete with such superproductions as 2001 and A Clockwork Orange.

| Jul 25, 2020

For me, it achieves something that 2001, with all its light shows and gimmicks, did not, a satisfactory conclusion.

| Dec 16, 2019

[Zardoz] demonstrates how one can make a cheap sci-fi flick look like a cheap sci-fi flick by using mirrors and prisms as substitutes for imagination.

| Oct 2, 2019

... pretentious sludge with some memorable visuals.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 27, 2019

You have to hand it to John Boorman. When he's brilliant, he's brilliant (Point Blank, Deliverance) but when he's terrible, he's really terrible.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 27, 2019

Boorman's finest film is a wonderfully eccentric and visually exciting sci-fi quest.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 27, 2019

Probably John Boorman's most underrated film-an impossibly ambitious and pretentious but also highly inventive, provocative, and visually striking SF adventure.

| Mar 27, 2019

"There's less to this than meets the eye."

| Mar 27, 2019

Whatever your verdict, you'll agree that Sean Connery compels attention...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 27, 2019

Such a wildly ambitious misfire that you can't help but root for it, or at least feel some twisted sense of affection for it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 2, 2018

Weird, fatuous and tedious fantasy futuristic sci-fi cult film.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 13, 2016

While it can't hope to achieve its grand ambitions, it's smart, it has some sharp dialogue, and the surrealism-on-a-shoestring visuals are undeniably striking.

| Jun 21, 2010

Zardoz is a futuristic, metaphysical and anthropological drama testing John Boorman in three creative areas. The results: direction, good; script, a brilliant premise which unfortunately washes out in climactic sound and fury; and production, outstanding.

| Feb 20, 2009