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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (19) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (14) | Rotten (5) | DVD (3)
Both characters are the kind of people who want to be left alone. That`s what you may feel like after you spend a few minutes with them.
The first four letters say it all.
Mickey Rourke gives a splendid performance as Bukowski's alter ego, the boozy, offbeat and eccentric writer, and he also brings the best out of Faye Dunaway as his unstable companion.
As I write about Barfly, I do seem to be talking myself into greater admiration for it, or at least into a sense of welcome design beneath its superficial inertia.
Charles Bukowski's semi-autobiographical short story-cum-screenplay is rich fodder for filmmaker Schroeder, who squeezes all the available juice out of it in a sensitively directed film
A lowlife seriocomedy.
An audacious movie about skid-row existentialism.
Captures Bukowski well.
Rourke and Dunaway are dynamite
A terrific little film that features the best performance Mickey Rourke has ever given. It drags you into its world and makes you care about the characters.
Usually when you see two people in as rough a shape as Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway look on the poster you don't expect a hell of a lot of entertainment out of that movie. Just honest misery. Fortunately, the late Charles Bukowski wrote Barfly and its entertaining as all hell. Rourke appropriately seems to play a mumbling caricature of Bukowski and a still attractive Dunaway fits the bill nicely. The soundtrack is outstanding and for as much as Bukowski's script shuffles along as Hank Chinaski himself does, its definitely hysterical and you don't really seem to mind. Cram that in with director Barbet Schroeder's talent for filling the movie with all kinds of grit and characters and the good times are rolling...
Super Reviewer
A brilliant film with what I believe to be Mickey Roarke's finest piece of work as an actor. The film was written by poet-author Charles Bukowski, and Roarke's character is based on Bukowski himself. Henry(Roarke) spends most of his time at the bar, getting into the occasional fistfight with the bartender Eddie which is so well portrayed by Frank Stallone, and gets involved with a haggard alcoholic portrayed by Faye Dunaway. Henry puts all the money he wins from his streetfights into his drink of choice, scotch and water, and occasionally buys one for the house, "To all my friends!" There's really not much going on with the story itself, but this film is simply entertaining, and manages to keep some humor in it's dim premise. Simplicity is usually better, and this film is a good example of what can be done when the right group of artists are put together.
Good acting can only help a film so far, this one is an ugly, depressing experience.
A rotten and dismal film. I did like that it ended, exactly how it started.
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