Paradise Alley

Universal Pictures | Release Date: September 22, 1978

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

53	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 8 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Striking in the way it evokes fears of abandonment—children’s worries blown up to grown-up scale—and completely unlike any film Stallone has put his name on since. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

Stallone creates a thoroughly enjoyable character, constantly hustling and delivering a nonstop stream of chatter, showing the kind of engaging work he was capable of early in his career. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The plot (Stallone scheming himself and his two brothers uptown on the tails of ambitious gimmickry) is shot full of sentimental holes; but the creation of a floridly fantasticated netherworld of low-life high-rollers and their inevitably multi-coloured circumlocutions is irresistible. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

It’s an upbeat, funny, nostalgic film populated by colorful characters, memorable more for their individual moments than for their parts in the larger story. Read full review

Jack Kroll

Paradise Alley lacks Rocky's primal simplicity: It's a parade of outrageous ploys that come pelting at you from all angles. [13 Nov 1978, p.106]

Gary Arnold

Stallone hasn't done himself proud in Paradise Alley. The film could still use a director, a scenario writer and someone to discourage the star from lapsing into happy-go-lucky imitations of Lee J. Cobb. Still, there's something likeable about this zany manipulator. [10 Nov 1978, p.E1]

Jay Scott

The problem with Paradise Alley is that it has been made by the character Stallone was playing in Rocky: it has the cinematic mind of a 14-year-old in the glossy body of a major movie. [14 Nov 1978]

Vincent Canby

A phony, attitudinizing, self-indulgent mess, a multimillion-dollar B (for boring) picture with the ear of a cauliflower, the heart of a hustler and the soul of a used-car salesman. Read full review