One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Reviews
Total Film
Cast, direction, score, look -- perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
The Nation
I enjoyed the picture because it is an action romance, worked out in wonderfully inventive detail and presented with mesmeric immediacy by one of the screen's most resourceful directors.
Groucho Reviews
Nicholson gets to use all the colors on his palette, from quiet, troubled contemplation to the disturbingly truthful, live-wire jesting with which he has become best associated. [Blu-ray]
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Cinema Crazed
A marvel of contemporary filmmaking with intelligence, entertainment value, and ponderings on life, manhood, and how society can be much scarier than nurses in white coats...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Combustible Celluloid
It's mostly Nicholson that makes the film work, with his fun, but very intelligent, canny turn.
There's a lot here. But with a classic like Cuckoo's Nest, too much is never enough.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Matt's Movie Reviews
A great cast, great screenplay and great performance makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest an enjoyable and thought provoking movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Turner Classic Movies Online
A rare screen adaptation of a beloved novel that maintains the emotional and dramatic power of the original while establishing its own distinctive approach to the story...
ColeSmithey.com
The genius of the film is that you never feel you're being preached at, but rather being allowed a fly-on-the-wall view of a systematic crushing of humanity.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
Viewed 30 years after its release, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest remains a very good motion picture, although one that perhaps just misses the pinnacle of greatness where its reputation suggests it resides.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Jack Nicholson stars in an outstanding characterization of Ken Kesey's asylum anti-hero, McMurphy, and Milos Forman's direction of a superbly-cast film is equally meritorious.
Film4
The film remains as fresh, shocking, depressing and exhilarating as when it was released.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
EmanuelLevy.Com
A terrific adaptation of Ken Kensey's 1962 novel (first done as play) that became timelier in the 1970s, positing a free-spirited hero (the excellent Jack Nicholson) against repressive authoritarianism, embodied by Fletcher's nurse.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
TV Guide's Movie Guide
Ken Kesey's grim satire of institutionalized authority, bracingly filmed by Milos Forman.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Jack Nicholson plays McMurphy as if he were born to it, and the supporting cast provides fine, detailed performances.
Cinema Sight
A stirring indictment of how we determine who's sane and who's crazy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Time Out
Top CriticSet in an insane asylum, the film involves the oppression of the individual, a struggle spearheaded by an ebullient Nicholson, turning in a star performance if ever there was one.
Arizona Daily Star
A rousing, rock-the-boat feel pulses throughout the film, overpowering its weaknesses.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Fantastica Daily
Without hesitation my No. 1 favorite of all time. At once a comedy and a tragedy, hilarious and heartbreaking, few films have ever achieved such a level of excellence.
| Original Score: 5/5
