Last Exit to Brooklyn

Plånborg Film | Release Date: May 4, 1990

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

62	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 21 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Jay Carr

German director Uli Edel's film of Last Exit to Brooklyn, while honorable, just doesn't roar off the screen the way the novel roared off the page. [11 May 1990, p.33p]

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Edel's stylized mise en scene purposefully frames and distances much of the action; but despite his obvious sincerity and goodwill, and the intrinsic interest of a very European handling of an American subject, the movie's bleakness and despair aren't accompanied by the unified vision that this sort of material requires. Read full review

Dave Kehr

Despite Leigh's and Lang's perfectly decent performances, the film never gathers a shred of credibility - perhaps on purpose, for that is what transforms its bleak vision into cruel comedy, making it possible to laugh comfortably at the characters. [11 May 1990, p.C]

EmpireCharles Shaar Murray

Despite feeling narratively let off the leash, Last Exit retains the passion of the novel, as well as the switch-blade characterisation. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

Selby’s book is considered a gutbucket classic of the post-Beat era, but its hellish vision was, in part, a reaction to the stifling postwar optimism of ’50s America. Now, it seems overdone — especially when recreated with this much hyperbolic showmanship. Last Exit to Brooklyn is so relentless it’s not of this world. Read full review

Jess Cagle

Aficionados of fine acting will find Last Exit to Brooklyn worth renting for the complex performances of Lang and Leigh. But, with its vague and unresolved story and themes, the movie remains a blur. Read full review

David Ansen

While this accomplished film holds you in its grip, it doesn't convince. The revelatory urgency that made Selby's book a literary scandal is long gone. [14 May 1990, p.75]

Peter Travers

Though Exit is often bold and imaginative, it is also curiously lifeless. The screenplay, by Desmond Nakano (Boulevard Nights), which combines the novel’s six separate stories, never adds up to a coherent whole. Read full review

Jay Scott

Edel's Last Exit generates visceral voltage, but the nation illuminated is the pre-unification West Germany of a mere moment ago, not the United States of 40 years gone by. [04 May 1990]

Staff (Not Credited)

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a bleak tour of urban hell, a $16 million Stateside-lensed production of Hubert Selby Jr's controversial 1964 novel. But it doesn't hold a scalpel to the lacerating torrential prose that made the book so cringingly urgent. Read full review

Desson Thomson

Edel, who supposedly fell in love with the novel as a Munich film student in the late '60s, has finally realized his adaptive dream. But for someone so devoted to the book, he (with screenwriter Desmond Nakano) ultimately betrays the novel's unrelenting brutality, its unshakably misanthropic point of view. Read full review

Hal Hinson

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake. Read full review