Salvador

Woods delivers one of his all-time great performances and Stone demonstrates the sheer ambition, both thematic and filmic, that would become a career theme. Read full review

Salvador, Oliver Stone's drama based on the recent strife in that country, has an irresistible brassiness, a swing-at-the-moon quality -- it's big and loud and bold, all primary colors, and it has more energy than any 10 films this year. [4 Apr 1986, p.D1]

Whatever may be flawed in Oliver Stone's searing, full-torque new war movie "Salvador", one thing about it is burningly right: It's alive. It broils, snaps and explodes with energy. The events (condensed from two years of battles and political upheaval in El Salvador) fly past at a murderous clip, hurtling you along almost demonically. [10 Apr 1986, p.6]

It serves as testimony to the ghosts that continue to haunt such men as ex-senator Bob Kerrey. Read full review

The polemic may seem obvious and at times laboured, but the action sequences are brilliant, and the film does achieve a brutal, often very moving, power. Read full review

Caustic, vivid, and without question the best major film about recent conflicts in Latin America. Read full review

Stone takes gritty subject matter and hacks it into a perilous ride based on Boyle's life in Salvador. Showing the true, upsetting and harsh realities of which most of us try not to think of. Pure Oliver Stone. Read full review

Central America has become a kind of hell on earth, and "Salvador" scorches us with this infernal truth. [17 March 1986, p.81]

MOST Americans are probably having a hard enough time trying to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in Central America, and Oliver Stone's "Salvador" is careful not to help us take sides. Much to its credit, that's mainly what makes this political thriller so terrifying...It's not that there aren't any villains in this film -- based on the real-life account of photo-journalist Richard Boyle who co-wrote the screenplay with Stone -- but that there are so few good guys to turn to. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]

Salvador is a movie about real events as seen through the eyes of characters who have set themselves adrift from reality. That's what makes it so interesting. Read full review

Despite the gripping action scenes and a mostly witty, mile-a-minute, off-color script, the movie ultimately fails to produce the emotional tug of other films about journalists in war, particularly Roland Joffe's "The Killing Fields" and Peter Weir's "The Year of Living Dangerously."The script borders on pompous silliness when Boyle launches into a diatribe on American hypocrisy, and unbelievable sentimentality when Salvadoran rebels are shown in heroic poses as Latin American folk songs ring out in the background... Nevertheless, "Salvador" still has the gritty, violent quality shared by other films by Stone: "Midnight Express" and "Scarface." None of these films is easy to watch, but each keeps you glued to the screen.

Like Midnight Express, for which Stone received an Academy Award for his screenplay adaptation, Salvador is better movie than document. But if Stone's style is entirely too florid for history, it is grimly arresting by Hollywood standards. Whatever else, Salvador is an original. [9 May 1986, p.D1]

The tale of American photojournalist Richard Boyle’s adventures in strife-torn Central America, Salvador is as raw, difficult, compelling, unreasonable, reckless and vivid as its protagonist. Read full review

The editing, too, is rough around the edges, but it all adds to the sense of madness that pervades El Salvador – a sense that only grows the more intense the further that Boyle journeys into this Central American heart of darkness. Read full review

Wexler told his story in credible human terms. Writer-director Stone felt the need to jazz up his action with wacked-out characters who belong in a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch. Read full review

Stone works some imaginative changes on the usual formulas of propagandistic fiction—Boyle is anything but the usual bland audience-identification figure, waiting around to be converted to the ideological position of the filmmakers—but as a director, he still didn't have the chops to bring off such an ambitious, multilayered project: the picture lunges into hysterical incoherence every few minutes, and Stone must resort to platitudinous simplifications to clear things up. It's lively, though, to say the very least. Read full review

The main characters tend to be either grotesques or stereotypes, who keep getting into incoherent arguments, composed largely of variations on America's favorite epithet...For a movie with pretensions to laying out political realities, the colorful Salvador is black and white. Read full review