Crossroads

Crossroads borrows so freely and is a reminder of so many other movies that it's a little startling, at the end, to realize how effective the movie is and how original it manages to feel despite all the plunderings. Read full review

Crossroads needs a leap of faith to swallow it whole, to buy its Faust-like premise of a musician's pact with the devil played against the realism of a contemporary road movie, but director Walter Hill lays out reasons enough to make us want to make that leap. Read full review

Working from a screenplay that drew on scriptwriter Fusco's experience as an itinerant young blues man, Hill and cinematographer Bailey perfectly capture the look and feel of the Mississippi Delta, heretofore little seen on film. Read full review

Seneca is worth watching, Ry Cooder's score is among his best work, and this certainly isn't sequel fodder. Read full review

Crossroads doesn't contain most of the common sins of today's youth films: cheap sex, fast cars and food fights. But you can't reward a film very much for what isn't there, if what is there leaves you wishing that its lead characters would break free from a tired story and sing and play with abandon. [14 March 1986, p.A]

You don't find many teen films about blues singers. You find hardly any about characters who don't smirk for 90 minutes before stumbling onto the meaning of life in the final passages. In Crossroads, it's the absences that are most refreshing. [14 March 1986, p.D1]

Crossroads is an uneasy hybrid. The script, by 26-year-old John Fusco, wants both to offer authentic homage to the great Delta musicians and to appeal to the teen market. [24 March 1986, p.77]

Unfortunately, the authentic music is betrayed by the final guitar competition, a kind of Karate Kid cacophony between Eugene and the devil's favorite, a punk rocker, in which souls are saved, but Mr. Cooder may have jeopardized his own. Read full review

Seneca acquits himself very nicely, while director Walter Hill pulls of the expected professional mob, but he pushes so hard for pace that he skates right over the opportunities for thought that the subject calls for. Read full review

A misbegotten mishmash. [14 March 1986, p.27]

So when the movie turns out drab and predictable, it's depressing -- you think Hill has become a stranger to his own sensibility. [24 March 1986, p.C3]

The first three-quarters of an hour...is junkily entertaining. but when they're on the road in the South, Willie turns into a curmudgeonly guardian angel, the boy starts learning lessons about life, and the picture is contemptible.