Last Exit to Brooklyn

Plånborg Film | Release Date: May 4, 1990

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

62	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 21 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Roger Ebert

These are fellow human beings who suffer, who are limited in their freedom to imagine greater happiness for themselves, and yet in their very misery they embody human striving. There is more of humanity in a prostitute trying to truly love, if only for a moment, than in all of the slow-motion romantic fantasies in the world. Read full review

Gene Siskel

Credit for the triumph of this picture must go to West German director Uli Edel, who works on a canvas as large as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. [11 May 1990, p.C]

Staff (Not Credited)

Not a comfortable film, but humane and savagely beautiful. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

In blending the personal worlds of these characters into a complete cosmology of the abyss, director Uli Edel (Christiane F.) and scriptwriter Desmond Nakano have transformed Selby's episodic book into an aesthetic whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Read full review

Vincent Canby

Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac. Read full review

Sheila Benson

Edel’s empathy with actors--which he showed in 1981 with the harrowing heroin saga, Christiane F.--is further strengthened by the remarkable performances here. Read full review

Judy Stone

It will seem unbearable to many, but the film unflinchingly mirrors what Selby observed from the depths of his own alcoholic and drug-addicted youth in Brooklyn. [23 May 1990, p.E1]

William Arnold

The movie as a whole seems pointlessly ugly. And with a gang rape that includes more than 50 participants and a homophobic bashing that results in a crucifixion, complete with heavy-handed Christ symbolism, it also opens itself up to a charge of being a tad overblown. [11 May 1990]

John Hartl

An oddly overblown, semi-operatic adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s once-banned 1964 novel about life among the abused prostitutes, lonely sailors, lonelier drag queens, repressed homosexuals and gay-bashing pimps along the hellish waterfront district of Brooklyn in 1952. [11 May 1990, p.22]