| 100 |
TV Guide
Staff (Not credited)
Visually stunning adventure. (Review of Original Release)
|
| 100 |
Chicago Reader
Don Drucker
A masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's finest works. (Review of Original Release)
|
| 100 |
Film Threat
Whereas "Cuckoo’s Nest" is a brilliantly over-the-top accomplishment, The Passenger is more brilliant with the most effortless underplaying one can ever hope to witness on screen.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Still packs a wallop. It's also a movie with no easy passage to its dark heart.
|
| 100 |
Boston Globe
What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
G. Allen Johnson
A rare chance to see a major cinematic work on the big screen.
|
| 100 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Antonioni's moviemaking panache and distinctive narrative rhythm rarely have seemed so enticing and satisfying.
|
| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
The film's final seven-minute shot is one of the great denouements in film history.
|
| 100 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A visually dazzling mood piece.
|
| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
The Passenger isn't finally the masterpiece some have made it out to be, but it retains a singular intrigue: It's the first, and probably the last, thriller ever made about depression.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
No other performer (Jack Nicholson) in an Antonioni film, except Jeanne Moreau in "La Notte," has so gracefully submitted to Mr. Antonioni and survived intact. (Review of Original Release)
|
| 90 |
Variety
Staff (Not credited)
Nicholson plays the character with personal flair, as penetrating as Antonioni's handling of the film. (Review of Original Release)
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Intended as a thriller of sorts, although Antonioni is, as always, too deeply involved in the angst of his characters to bother much with the story. (Review of Original Release)
|
| 88 |
Rolling Stone
The script, co-written by Antonioni and Peter Wollen, focuses on a TV journalist (a superb Jack Nicholson).
|
| 83 |
Portland Oregonian
It's refreshing that something once considered terribly new and modern can still feel contemporary three decades later.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
A fascinating reflection of the era when it was made; but a starker indictment still of what film culture has become. In 1975, The Passenger was a night at the movies.
|
| 80 |
Village Voice
The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
In casting Jack Nicholson as the jaded Anglo-American journalist who abandons his previous life during a trip to Africa and adopts a dangerous new identity, Antonioni was working with a more powerful and charismatic actor than he has before or since. The result is something like a glamorous thriller or a disaster film in slow motion.
|
| 80 |
Empire
A bleak and moving drama with reflective performance from Jack Nicolson.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
It reminds one of "The Constant Gardener," another globetrotting thriller bereft of thrills that looks more important in retrospect than on the screen. Certainly, one man's trash is another man's masterpiece, and more power to the viewer who can stick with this deadpan travelogue and make it to the ending that actually satisfies.
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