Metacritic reviews

De Niro's little known masterclass makes this essential viewing.

A curiously cool, but very intelligent movie. [02 Jan 2000, p.19C]

The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.

Although uneven, the result is still a lot better than Hollywood's last look at itself (Day of the Locust) and its last slice of Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby).

A luminous, ambitious but only fitfully alive adaptation (by Harold Pinter) of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Hollywood novel. Robert De Niro is wonderful as the extraordinarily complex, subtle and perceptive Monroe Stahr, whom Fitzgerald based on Irving Thalberg. [01 Oct 1989, p.7]

Harold Pinter's cold and gnomic script seems partly to blame, as well as interfering producer Sam Spiegel; but if you forget that you're supposed to be seeing something meaningful or important, this is pretty watchable.

Fitzgerald's unfinished novel transfers awkwardly to the screen but is saved from oblivion by that always-fascinating actor De Niro, who essays the role of the movie mogul (based on MGM's Irving Thalberg).

Producer Sam Spiegel's contribution is admirable, but Elia Kazan's direction of the Pinter plot seems unfocussed though craftsmanlike. Robert De Niro's performance as the inscrutable boy-wonder of films is mildly intriguing.

Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what's missing--Pinter's art is the art of taking away.

A generally lacklustre affair. [03 Mar 2013, p.44]