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]