White Hunter Black Heart

Warner Bros. | Release Date: September 14, 1990

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

66	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 29 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Nina Darnton

Eastwood is climbing peaks as a director that Eastwood the actor can't scale. Perhaps it's time to cut the rope. [01 Oct 1990, p.70D]

Owen Gleiberman

White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer’s instinct, not to mention his modesty. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

White Hunter is an ambitious and intriguing project that never amounts to anything more than the sum of its parts--a trait shared by many of Eastwood's other major project as an independent filmmaker, Bird. Read full review

Jay Carr

The sad thing about Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart is that it fails in every important respect, yet is in no way cheap or exploitative. [20 Sep 1990, p.81p]

Bill Cosford

White Hunter, Black Heart looks good, but it's as humorless as Eastwood himself increasingly appears to be. [21 Sep 1990, p.G5]

Ty Burr

White Hunter, Black Heart wants to show us a specific heart of darkness — a man who, by striving to kill one of nature’s grandest creatures, hoped to annihilate part of himself — but the theme gets lost in shades of gray. Read full review

EmpireMark Cooper

Walking a fine line between being a masterpiece and a dogs dinner, this movie strays into the latter, though giving some historical illumination to the movie-making process as it was in the 1950s. A white elephant. Read full review

Hal Lipper

Eastwood is absolutely the wrong actor to play Huston, called John Wilson in White Hunter, Black Heart. Eastwood is tense and tightly coiled, while Huston was gleefully bombastic. [12 Oct 1990, p.7]