Average Rating: 8.2/10
Reviews Counted: 25
Fresh: 25 | Rotten: 0
Director Billy Wilder's unflinchingly honest look at the effects of alcoholism may have had some of its impact blunted by time, but it remains a powerful and remarkably prescient film.
Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 4
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 0
Director Billy Wilder's unflinchingly honest look at the effects of alcoholism may have had some of its impact blunted by time, but it remains a powerful and remarkably prescient film.
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Average Rating: 4/5
User Ratings: 7,398
Billy Wilder's searing portrait of an alcoholic features an Oscar-winning performance by Ray Milland as Don Birnam, a writer whose lust for booze consumes his career, his life, and his loves. The story begins as Don and his brother Wick (Philip Terry) are packing their bags in their New York apartment, preparing for a weekend in the country. Philip, aware of his brother's drinking problem, is keeping an eye of him, making sure he doesn't sneak a drink before the departure of their train.
Nov 16, 1945 Wide
Feb 6, 2001
All Critics (25) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (25) | Rotten (0) | DVD (9)
Director Billy Wilder's technique of photographing Third Avenue in the grey morning sunlight with a concealed camera to keep the crowds from being self-conscious gives this sequence the shock of reality.
Top CriticIt is intense, morbid -- and thrilling. Here is an intelligent dissection of one of society's most rampant evils.
Today it's less impressive but not without its virtues.
A shatteringly realistic and morbidly fascinating film.
An uncompromising look at alcoholism at a time when addiction was considered a personal failing to be swept under the rug of polite society.
Bold, sobering, intelligently written and acted with great skill by Ray Milland.
Painfully sincere and uncompromising look at alcoholism for a film released in 1945, with a superb central performance.
It still makes one of the strongest statements about alcoholism, though time has taken away some of its edge.
A stirring portrait of the horrors of alcohol addiction.
What makes the film so gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally stripped of all glamour.
The changes made in adapting the book to the big screen are instructive: In the novel, Ray Milland's alcoholic Don was a troubled bisexual, but in the movie, he's a writer suffering from a creative block.
A landmark film in terms of Hollywood's treatment of adult subject matter as fair game.
More realistic than sentimentalized Hollywood crowd-pleasers like Harvey, and more accessible than complete downers like Leaving Las Vegas, The Lost Weekend is, to me, the definitive film on the subject of alcoholism.
One of the most justly celebrated 'problem films' of the 1940s.
Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend" could very well serve as a public service film in some support groups akin to Alcoholics Anonymous! I mean rarely have I come across a film that that is solely dedicated to chronicling an alcoholic's drinking binge over a trying weekend, as he recalls the period of time during which
July 11, 2011Super Reviewer
Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend," which beat "Mildred Pierce" for the Best Picture Oscar of 1945, must have felt like a watershed event for those who saw it back then. This film, with its horrific, realistic depiction of alcoholism, surely helped kick-start the Alcoholics Anonymous movement that has so transformed
September 20, 2011
Super Reviewer
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