A Streetcar Named Desire Reviews
August 23, 2020
By the end of this Elia Kazan production, the revelations aren't shocking or memorable or morbidly palatable; in many ways, they're just depressing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
February 10, 2020
Elia Kazan's claustrophobic close-ups do a fine job of recreating the intensity of the stage.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
February 6, 2020
Even taking this performance alone, Brando's work deserves to be known as an abiding cinematic performance. Amongst cowardly and callous acts, there still rests a level of pathos to the character.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
November 26, 2019
Vivien Leigh's virtuoso portrayal was the year's finest acting...in the same picture Marlon Brando gives a brilliant and appalling performance as a primeval brute.
August 7, 2019
Some movie goers will be bored by its unlovely subject and wealth of talk, but others will admire it as an excursion into art.
January 9, 2019
Also screened was A Streetcar Named Desire, revamped with the four additional minutes that were excised years ago by censors. It was being paraded about as if a half-hour had been added. So now Stella walks down the steps sultrily.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
January 3, 2018
Vivien Leigh gives one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke pity and terror.
November 7, 2016
The fact it was the fifth most lucrative film in its year of release is a depressing sign of how we have infantilized ourselves as spectators. [Full review in Portuguese.]
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
November 29, 2014
Seeing the film reminds us instantly of our perennial desire to be swept up into a compelling story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
July 31, 2013
Tennessee Williams filled the tinderbox. Marlon Brando ignited it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
May 19, 2012
... a Hollywood landmark, both for pushing the envelope of subject matter allowed on screen by the censors and for showcasing the more naturalistic "method" approach to performance ...
April 25, 2012
An unqualified masterpiece.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
February 10, 2012
Epic performances in a movie that seethes with atmosphere.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
March 15, 2011
Starring Brando and Vivien Leigh, Kazan's screen version of Williams' masterpiece is the best film made out of the playwright's theaterical work.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
February 17, 2011
"Stella!" classic is powerful tale of abuse, alcoholism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
February 20, 2009
Has a permanent place amongst the classics, not only for the performances but for Tennessee Williams' raw writing about people raw with pain, fear, longing and complicated feelings
November 14, 2008
The blistering sexual repression is the entire point of the 1950s. Quite simply, fabulous.
November 14, 2008
The film is perhaps best regarded as an intelligent and engaged recreation of the original Broadway experience, in which Jessica Tandy first played the role. There's no denying the awful horror and pity of the final scene.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
November 14, 2008
it's a close-to-definitive example of how to make a great play work on film, for all the very slight air of Hollywood compromise.
November 14, 2008
Simply a masterful adap of Tennessee Williams' sultry, searing play and an affirmation of Marlon Brando's acting genius.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5