The Killing Fields

A mighty accomplishment, and possibly the bravest Britflick yet made. Read full review

One of the risks taken by The Killing Fields is to cut loose from that tradition, to tell us a story that does not have a traditional Hollywood structure, and to trust that we'll find the characters so interesting that we won't miss the cliché. It is a risk that works, and that helps make this into a really affecting experience. Read full review

A powerful, gut-wrenching film that ranks in the top of the 1984 product. [19 Nov 1984]

Roland Joffé's 1984 masterwork is a solid piece of historical film-making, capturing factual detail without sacrificing fine storytelling. Read full review

The Killing Fields is the best movie about journalism since "All the President's Men," re-creating with an understated ease the atmosphere of the poolside bonhomie of the correspondents, the mechanics of getting and filing a story, and the moral quandaries of a reporter's professional detachment. Read full review

The first hour, sprawling, chaotic and violently messy, is very good indeed, conveying both the complexity and the essential absurdity of war, while the photography by Chris Menges is stunningly convincing in detailing the scale of the carnage. Read full review

An extraordinary movie. [5 Nov 1984, p.74]

The most powerful study of the Vietnam era since "Apocalypse Now"...Roland Joffe's direction is gripping, unflagging, if sometimes ragged. But the flaws strengthen the film, give it a more realistic edge, which truly reflects the time and captures the joy of forgiveness and friendship refound. [18 Jan 1985, p.25]

Like Apocalypse Now, The Killing Fields tries to show the Southeast Asian war as a lethal spasm of recent history, wholly predictable but nonetheless quite unexpected, and all the more terrible for those elements. And like Apocalypse Now, this film succeeds in the almost surreal business of recalling a nightmare. At its best, The Killing Fields is unforgettable. [18 Jan 1985, p.D1]

Gripping, intelligent, provocative drama...Incisively directed by newcomer Roland Joffe, although the story sags in spots and the beginning is draggy. Read full review

A solid, stark, cheerless rendering of hard-boiled storytelling. It’s historical filmmaking at its most candid and its most pragmatic. Read full review

It must have been difficult for Schanberg to confront the record of his own blindness and powerlessness when he wrote the articles on which this movie is based. It must be nerve-racking for the producers to offer a tale so lacking in standard melodramatic satisfactions. But the result is worth it, for this is the clearest film statement yet on how the nature of heroism has changed in this totalitarian century. Read full review

Every scene of The Killing Fields (and every participant in its making) is in service of showing how abruptly a seemingly safe and vital individual can have everything essential stripped away. Read full review

A deeply moving film. Read full review

A story of perseverance and survival in hell on earth, The Killing Fields represents an admirable, if not entirely successful, attempt to bring alive to the world film audience the horror story that is the recent history of Cambodia. Read full review

Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose. Read full review

It's an ambitious movie made with an inept, sometimes sly, and very often equivocal script...But it's by no means a negligible movie.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity. Read full review