Nickelodeon

Bogdanovich is trying to do an interesting and commendable thing in dramatizing aesthetic passion; his failure is as noble as it is conspicuous. Read full review

A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much. Read full review

Nickelodeon is two hours and two minutes of impersonations.Some of them are very good impersonations—deft and funny—but they lack a life to string them together. Read full review

The direction is agonisingly pedantic for a comedy, and leaves O'Neal and Reynolds totally exposed, mugging away in charmless and clumsy fashion. Read full review

An attempt by director Bogdanovich to capture his great love of early movies in a full-length motion picture. Read full review

Peter Bogdanovich's film is an okay comedy-drama about the early days of motion pictures. Story begins with a group of barnstorming filmmakers in the pre-feature film era, later segues to the adolescence of the industry. Read full review

Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles. Read full review

It sounds promising, but Bogdanovich attempts an exercise in style, and the result is sustained clutter.

Nickelodeon is Bogdanovich's sweet funny homage to the days before World War I when America played with its new toy, the movies, in those converted storefronts or jerry-built pantheons where for a nickel you could enter the new magic darkness of electric centuryIn that flickering, faintly salacious darkness, a new innocence was born. [27 Dec 1976, p.56]