61
Metascore
9 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 80EmpireAngie ErrigoEmpireAngie ErrigoIf Fosse's film fails to capture the man or his art completely, it remains a damn good place to start.
- 75TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineHarsh, funny, grim, and, like all Bob Fosse's films, primarily concerned with the intersection of life and showbiz.
- 70New York Magazine (Vulture)New York Magazine (Vulture)Tailored to a point rather than to comprehensive biography, its triumph is its touch upon the public nerve of our most private inhibition. [30 Dec 1974, p.86]
- 63Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertFosse’s attempt to give us Lenny Bruce as society’s victim and a martyr to noble causes never quite works, and so the movie becomes just several good scenes and a fine Hoffman performance, not a persuasive portrait of a man.
- 60The New York TimesVincent CanbyThe New York TimesVincent CanbyOne-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.
- 50The New YorkerPauline KaelThe New YorkerPauline KaelDespite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.
- 50Time OutTime OutThe monochrome photography and pseudo-documentary interpolations can't disguise the basic Harold Robbins material, and the good performances (Hoffman and Perrine) stand little chance against Fosse's withering direction: the subject matter needs far defter psychological handling than it gets.