Cutter's Way

Eichhorn, who should have had a much bigger career, is luminous as the sad-eyed heroine, while Heard pulls off the showy role - especially in a climax that finds him rampaging through a posh party at the Cord estate in search of justice. Read full review

Cutter's Way is a movie that starts yielding up its real treasures around the third viewing, so stick with it (you'll hate the ending first time out). I've seen it perhaps 30 times – it may be my favourite American movie – and, unlike its three broken leads, I have still yet to hit bottom. For once, the word is appropriate: masterpiece. Read full review

A fiercely powerful film... An inspiring film, it is constructed like a thriller; but instead of reaching for thrills, it leaves them in the background and concentrates on the complexities of its characters. Read full review

Czech director Ivan Passer’s use of late-summer light is rich and entrancing, while Bridges and Heard give their all: the latter delivers a performance of spectacular rage and intensity. The result is nothing less than a modern masterpiece, and a film ripe for rediscovery. Read full review

The three leads are on outstanding form, while Jack Nitzsche's score shimmers with foreboding. Read full review

It’s an underrated classic. Read full review

This stunning, unjustly neglected 1981 release unfolds much like a Ross MacDonald Lew Archer mystery as it becomes a singularly devastating indictment of the plight of the neglected Vietnam veteran. [13 March 1988, p.2]

This sleeper never caught on with the masses but became a cult movie after making a lot of the year's 10-best lists. [19 Sept 1997, p.13D]

An unclassifiably brilliant gem of American independent film-making. Read full review

While you don't come out of this movie feeling pleased, you may come out feeling mysteriously affected, muttering to yourself, "This one is on to something . . ." [19 Nov 1981, p.C15]

One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers. Read full review

A handsome, ambitious film that fails to satisfy—perhaps because the director, Ivan Passer, insists on an ambiguity on the plot level that muddies and dilutes the thematic thrust. Read full review

The film, adapted by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin and directed by Ivan Passer, captures Thornburg's tense, moody vision of life on the California edge, but it runs into trouble as a mystery. Fiskin has radically altered the last third of the book and has come up with a new ending that is far too ambiguous, abrupt and silly. One feels let down that so much comes to so little...Yet the film's sad twilight glow lingers. Cutter and Bone and Mo get under your skin. [6 Apr 1981, p.103]

The film is packed with symbolic gestures, though they're not quite as effective as the ghostly fiesta scene behind the opening titles, with senoritas dancing to music that's different from the music we hear, and castanets silently clicking.

Cutter's Way suffers from a terminal case of creative indecision. With any number of initially intriguing plot lines, director Ivan Passer and scripter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin never come close to shedding light on what, if anything, this picture is really about. Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn all deliver exceptionally fine topline performances, but their efforts seem wasted in such a weak vehicle. Read full review

CUTTER AND BONE can't decide whether to be a buddy movie, a menage-a-trois drama, or a murder movie, and hence fails at all three. Too bad, because Czech-born Ivan Passer has an obvious talent for creating mood and atmosphere.

The performances in Cutter's Way are devastated by the script. [18 Sept 1981]

It's the sort of picture that never wants to concede what it's about. It is, however, enchanted by the sound of its own dialogue, which is vivid without being informative or even amusing on any level. Read full review

The intelligence and artistry with which Cutter's Way dresses up the top few cliches of the 1980s is amazing. This is a film with brittle dialogue, complicated acting and visual subtlety in the service of a trite and unworkable story. [20 Nov 1981, p.21]