Arizona Dream

Lewis is only slightly awful, and he and Depp have a nice rapport; Dunaway gives a particularly juicy performance; and Taylor is simply amazing, seemingly able to transform herself physically for every role she plays. Read full review

Bold and beautiful ideas perfectly realised. Read full review

It illustrates the truism that the biggest difference between European and American directors using America as a site for fantasies is that the Europeans are likelier to know what they're doing. Read full review

It is goofier than hell - you can't stop watching because nobody in the audience, and possibly nobody on the screen, has any idea what's going to happen next. Read full review

Arizona Dream is an inspired, erratic goulash that ignores standard movie- making formulas. Read full review

The movie's humor is engaging but odd. The script is pretentious but sweet. And the symbolic use of the flying machine-which pulls you back to "Brewster McCloud"-doesn't work very well. But a flawed film like "Arizona Dream," with its wistfulness and pain, is still twice as interesting as most of the bloated, slick, empty successes that tend to get released here, films that look as if they were dreamed up by used-car salesmen in a desert. [6 Jan 1995, p.L]

Arizona Dream is enjoyably adrift, a wildly off-the-wall reverie. It's more than a fish out of water. Read full review

Arizona Dream is the quintessential Nuart movie. It’s a dazzling, daring slice of cockamamie tragicomic Americana envisioned with magic realism by a major, distinctive European filmmaker, the former Yugoslavia’s Emir Kusturica. Read full review

A curate's egg with more than its share of longueurs, but its comically surreal viewpoint is infectious. Read full review

Aside from avuncular Lewis and two-bricks-shy-of-a-load Dunaway, this movie's greatest asset is Depp. With his scooped-out cheeks, flower petal mouth and an innately balletic approach to communicating with the camera, he is as natural a performer as film has seen in many years. Read full review

Impeccably lensed in Alaska, New York and Douglas, Ariz, pic remains stuck in an awkward netherworld between slapstick and pathos. Read full review

Recalling the ‘70s shaggy-dog stories of Makavejev, Ashby, and Schatzberg, Kusturica’s French-financed American venture deserved better than the neglect it suffered in the blockbuster age. Read full review

Depp, who has never looked so angelic, is covering familiar ground here, playing another Gilbert Grape type who's involved with an older woman. [9 Sept 1994, p.H34]

If you're in the market for a whimsical, incorrigibly weird movie that basically goes nowhere, try "Arizona Dream." But if you have little patience for self-indulgent movies that substitute scatter-gun blasts of surreal black comedy for dramatic structure and realistic characterization, steer clear of this curiosity from noted Yugoslav film-maker Emir Kusturica ("When Father Was Away on Business"). [9 Sept 1994]

It's one of the year's most unforgettable exercises in pointlessness. [16 Sept 1994, p.62]

There's evidence of his talent in some lyrical flying scenes, but the movie is so addled you'd think it was conceived by Michael J. Pollard, who shares a one-on-one scene with Lewis here (the mind boggles). [24 March 1995, p.3D]

HAT in the name of artsy pretension do we have here? That Arizona Dream is a nightmare is beyond dispute - it's the sort of murky, symbol-laden trap that European directors often fall into when they cross the pond to take on the entire social stratum of the United States. The culprit in question is Emir Kusturica - Yugoslavian born, Czech trained, and now American buffaloed. This thing makes The Red Desert look coherent. [19 Nov 1994]