Critics reviews

There’s a pleasant freeform ramshackle vibe, it feels simultaneously over-stylised and under-rehearsed, and the leads seem to be enjoying themselves immensely.

It’s ostensibly “a safety valve for humanity” but Petri’s wry perspective reveals the activity as less primal scream than the logical evolution of today’s reality TV fad.

It's a film that is ahead of its time, and despite its resolutely commercial origins, nevertheless manages to inject a health dose of social criticism into what might superficially be seen as simply another action/comedy thriller. In this, then, the film is an admirable success on all levels, and absolutely worth seeing, both as an artifact of the 1960s, and an all-too-accurate vision of the future.

Endlessly inventive in both humor and visual design, the film is sheer candy.

Petri won the foreign-language Oscar for his far superior 1970 film, “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” but it’s “The 10th Victim” that lingers in the public imagination... The playful production design, by Michelangelo Antonioni’s regular collaborator Piero Poletto, probably accounts for much of the movie’s continued appeal. His Rome of the future has been assembled out of the architecture of the Fascist past...

Visually speaking, The 10th Victim is, at bottom, a pop-art melting pot. Every scene is filled with eye-catching eye candy, whether bright primary tones or optical-illusion backdrops; the film employs a sort of bric-a-brac bricolage... championing its comic-strip sensibilities... at the same time that it decries mass culture’s “bread and circuses,” lowest-common-denominator appeal.

Blessed by a game cast, gorgeous visuals (by 8 1/2’s cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo) and a director who would eventually make it to the Oscars for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, The 10th Victim seems to prophesy faux-celebrity death culture by a good 30 years.

Had he played it straight, director Elio Petri (Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion) might have created an effective thriller; by opting to play it slant, however, he crafted something even better. Equal parts drive-in fodder, Alphaville, and Sleeper, with a high-'60s vision of the future that would make the creators of The Prisoner jealous, Petri's film is an unrestrained satire that literalizes the battle of the sexes.

This witty, poker-faced 1965 Italian adaptation of Robert Sheckley's memorable story “The Sixth Victim”... has probably dated badly, but that's a good reason to see it.

What is actually delivered in this peculiarly supergraphic film is a clever but patently self-conscious intellectual exercise, much on the order of that which Jean-Luc Godard gave us recently in "Alphaville." The cleverness is so insistent that it soon becomes excessive and absurd, and the gamesmanship of the satire becomes too cute, too much a bore.