Kritiken

It's as radiant and lovely a collection of images as any American ever produced. If they happen to add up to a living nightmare of juvenile derangement, then so be it. Cimino's compositions were worth twice of most of his peers'. It'll be a long time before someone this mad and smart wants to make genre films again.

The movie is as constrained by its largely domestic (and largely interior) setting as by its blatant commercialism; it's the film of a director working much of the time with a hand tied behind his back. Yet its outdoor scenes and its scenes of escape, set in distant, rugged, and rhapsodic terrain, suggest that the illicit thrill of the outlaw life is an inescapable but doomed element of the American dream.