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The Year of Living Dangerously
Metascore
65 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 9 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 9
  3. Negative: 0 out of 9
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  1. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    100
    The Year of Living Dangerously is a wonderfully complex film about personalities more than events, and we really share the feeling of living in that place, at that time.
  2. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Michael Blowen
    100
    The movie masterfully evokes, through stunning direction and magnificent performances, the heat and passion of desperate people living in desperate times. [18 Feb 1983]
    All this publication's reviews
  3. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not Credited)
    88
    Ambitious, stylish, and ideologically confused, The Year of Living Dangerously falters in its attempts to succeed simultaneously as thriller, romance, and political tract, while also encompassing director Peter Weir's penchant for half-baked mysticism. Still, it's a gripping film.
  4. Empire
    Reviewed by: Ian Nathan
    80
    With its echoes of Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," the script is inevitably preachy and Weir's camera glowers over the injustices of President Sukarno's failing regime in late 1965, but the performances are strong and the drama gripping.
  5. Variety
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not Credited)
    80
    Here is an astonishing feat of acting by New Yorker Linda Hunt, cast by Weir because he could not locate a short male actor to fit the bill. A bizarre, yet touching, romantic triangle develops between Gibson, Hunt, and Sigourney Weaver as a British Embassy official.
  6. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Vincent Canby
    60
    Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously is a good, romantic melodrama that suffers more than most good, romantic melodramas in not being much better than it is.
  7. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
    60
    The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels. What saves this meditation on the vestiges of colonialism is, ironically, its celebration of American star power.
  8. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Jay Scott
    50
    The Year of Living Dangerously is chic, enigmatic, self-assured - and empty. [18 Feb 1983]
    All this critic's reviews
  9. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Dave Kehr
    40
    Peter Weir's attempt to make a "Casablanca" for the 80s - a romance set against a background of exoticism and intrigue - suffers from hazy plotting and a constant, pretentious mystification.
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