Reds

Not since Lawrence of Arabia has there been a serious historical movie of this sweep, complexity and intelligence. Read full review

Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies. Read full review

Warren Beatty's Reds is an extraordinary picture. Three hours and 19 minutes long, it is occasionally rambling and repetitious, but nearly always intelligent and engrossing. Read full review

Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' as well as a commercial movie with a rare sense of history. Read full review

It’s a stylistic throwback as well: an old-fashioned, star-studded, big-budget historical epic with an intermission, filmed in a classical style that hearkens back in some ways to David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Read full review

An engrossing, beautifully filmed and remarkably balanced portrait of a fascinating moment in history, cleverly enhanced by the intercutting of real-life documentary interviews. Reds is everything a historian could want in a movie. Read full review

This is an epic you have to listen to--it's about people who trade in words, who make revolutions in their heads, and Beatty and Trevor Griffiths's script is full of some of the best talk in any movie this year. [7 Dec 1981, p.83]

Reds is about the personal and the political and the intermingling of the two—what it meant for Reed and Bryant as a couple and, for Bryant particularly, separately. Both performances support the movie’s overall project: to demonstrate that these “reds” were real people, with good intentions, brave convictions, naive expectations, and—first and foremost—complicated hearts. Read full review

As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it. Read full review

Reds is finally just an appealingly conventional epic movie-star romance with radical trimmings, but it contains several sharper elements that suggest the colorful period it seeks to recreate. Read full review

The film's chief attribute, however, is also one of its major flaws. In presenting an up-close, personal look at the lives of its famous figures--particularly Reed and Bryant in their love affair and marriage--the film sometimes gives short shrift to the world-shaking events that are its unique subject. Nonetheless, the brilliantly designed and photographed REDS is a beautiful, passionate film, both in its stunningly recreated action scenes and its quietest moments. Read full review

Ambitious but hokey melodrama...It's a beautiful looking film, but only the supporting characters are believable. Beatty and Diane Keaton are miscast and never disappear into their characters. [25 Dec 1981]

The subject - the romantic life of an American Communist - may be daring, but the moviemaking is extremely traditional, with Beatty playing a man who dies for an ideal. It's rather a sad movie, because it isn't really very good.

The reach of this sprawling, ambitious epic often exceeds its grasp. It has something in common with its hero. [5 Dec 1981]

Reds bites off more than an audience can comfortably chew. Constant conflicts between politics and art, love and social conscience, individuals versus masses, pragmatism against idealism, take the form of intense and eventually exhausting arguments that dominate the script by Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths. Read full review

On screen, Reds evolves into an earnestly muddled mishmash of Romance and History. An intriguing, ambitious disappointment, it launches the Christmas movie season on a note of droopy-spirited seriousness...It isn't the running time alone that makes Reds a tough sell and a discouraging endurance test; it's the lack of an emotional payoff strong enough to justify an epic trek down the corridors of history. [4 Dec 1981, p.D1]