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Top Critics (5)
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Fresh (31)
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DVD (11)
It's a great work of the Discover America Seventies.
The film's nervewracking quality is consistent with its content. Nicholson's performance is a remarkably varied and daring exploration of a complex character, equally convincing in its manic and sober aspects.
The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.
Rafelson is expert at supporting this movement, and the film proceeds from scene to scene with a quiet competent modernism that bespeaks quality, but that more often begs than provides expression.
We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending.
An American entry into the French New Wave starring a compelling Jack Nicholson.
Boasting a career best performance by Jack Nicholson in the lead role, Rafelson's movie is a penetrating study of American alienation.
moves from scenes of quiet desperation to moments of great black humor
[Jack] Nicholson helped redefine the leading man as a guy who doesn't have the answers but still swaggers through with the show of confidence and control of someone who does.
Both spirited road movie and existential journey.
Five Easy Pieces, a brilliant gem of American psychological realism (where are these movies today?), is Nicholson's arrival to the A-list.
A key American film of its era, Bob Rafelson's moody, character-driven tale of an upper-middle class dropout established Jack Nicholson as the foremost actor of his generation in articulating the values of the new generation.
Bobby can be seen as spiritual descendant of Melville's scrivener Bartleby, preferring not to participate in a world to which he doesn't subscribe.
Jack Nicholson shines in the film that helped cement his reputation as one of the finest actors of his generation.
This episodic character study is one of the key American films of its era.
Just give the guy a piece of toast.
The result is less a story and more a collection of incidents and character studies, all of which inform each other and extend our understanding of Nicholson's mode of survival: flight.
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