The Cotton Club

Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club is, quite simply, a wonderful movie. It has the confidence and momentum of a movie where every shot was premeditated -- and even if we know that wasn't the case, and this was one of the most troubled productions in recent movie history, what difference does that make when the result is so entertaining? Read full review

In the way it deemphasizes its script and consciously undercuts its star, Cotton Club adventurously questions the formulas of Hollywood; its success in doing so without a hint of boredom or pretension augurs a whole new way of making movies. It's the most entertaining art film of the year, the kind of movie you can't help smiling along with. Read full review

Francis Ford Coppola magically recreates the era, its movies and its music, in this razzle-dazzle celebration, some fact and some fiction. Read full review

Lavish, interesting, evocative but strained and self-conscious, The Cotton Club is all watchable curiosity. Read full review

It was the most assured film Coppola had made in a decade, full of casual wit and visual invention. And even though the split narrative doesn't quite cohere, Coppola wins an amazingly high proportion of his risky bets, including a finale that takes off into total abstraction. Read full review

Dramatically, Coppola and co-screenwriter William Kennedy, juggle a lot of balls in the air. The parallel stories of Gere and Hines’ professional rise prove more potent, thanks largely to a mixture of romance, music and gangland involvement. Hines and McKee generate real sparks in their relationship and latter adds an interesting dimension as a light-skinned singer trying to hide her racial origins. Read full review

This movie is so packed with character, incident and detail that it seems to whiz by like a ferocious number by a high powered jazz ensemble. In the process it skimps on connections and short-circuits many of its emotional relationships. But Coppola, called in to rescue the project and working under crazy financial and creative pressure, has come up with a vision of jazz-age fever in which violence, romance and race are choreographed to the music of the Harlem renaissance. [24 Dec 1984, p.52]

Cotton Club lacks the resonance of The Godfather; it's similar stylistically, but everything is coarsened, caricatured. What Coppola has achieved, however, is what Sergio Leone was after in Once Upon a Time in America when he tried to celebrate America by recycling the cliches of its gangster films. [14 Dec 1984]

The film's period settings and spectacular on-stage showbiz set-pieces are fabulous, its meandering script much less so. The thing feels like a movie with its heart ripped out. Read full review

The Cotton Club is not a bad film, just a bland one; not inept, just inert. Given its garish production history, one rather expected The Cotton Club to sing with hot-jazz desperation. Instead, we get the mediocre craftsmanship of a pit band in Vegas. Read full review

There's so much going on you can't take your eyes off it, but none of it means anything.

The Cotton Club is not a complete disaster, but it's not a whole lot of fun. It just runs on and on at considerable length, doing obligatory things, being photographically fancy but demonstrating no special character, style or excitement. Read full review

The Cotton Club never seems to go anywhere, so that we are caught up short when it seems to have gotten somewhere. Then it's over, finished in Hines' blaze of glory, and a few minutes later one wonders what one has seen. It's big and colorful and terribly thin. [14 Dec 1984, p.E18]

The narrative is a mess despite the simplistic twinning of tales, and - worse yet - keeps interrupting the heart-stopping hoofing. Read full review