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Critics reviews

BURROUGHS: THE MOVIE

Howard Brookner United States, 1983
The film is essentially a collage of fairly disparate materials, and it relies rather more than the end-credits acknowledge on the late 50s/early 60s black-and-white- footage that Antony Balch shot with Burroughs and Brio Gysin in Paris, London and New York... Still, the film is briskly edited and intelligently organized, and it assuredly provides a more vivid account of Burroughs's life and art than any other available.
December 2, 2016
The cumulative effect condenses the Burroughs persona into an image of indefatigable will, an almost immortal figure not for his altruism or good deeds, but the sheer singularity of his vision, both literal and figurative. Burroughs: The Movie tries to understand how Burroughs sees the world, but ultimately reroutes those interests away from investigative revelation and back inward, toward the lively abyss that is Burroughs's oeuvre.
December 21, 2015
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The film plays like a valiant effort to fashion something semi-coherent from all that material, but it never really seems as if Brookner had a vision for what Burroughs: The Movie should be. He simply found Burroughs fascinating, and who can blame him? The man's insurance-salesman-gone-to-seed demeanor and creaky staccato rasp of a voice make for a hypnotic combination, especially if you've read Naked Lunch or The Nova Trilogy and are familiar with the casually outré nature of his prose.
December 12, 2015
Brookner's inexperience is evident in the film's uncertain pacing and stilted editing, but his youthful enthusiasm for his subject and willingness to play with the documentary form, a mirror of the writer's own experimental style, mostly compensate for these shortcomings.
November 13, 2014
Shot mostly in and around 1981, it's easy to see the film now as a seminal document of one of America's greatest artists. Documentarian Howard Brookner mostly avoids the pitfalls of biographical filmmaking due to Burroughs's unerring candor and contextualization of himself amidst historical realities (the Depression then WWII) and literary movements (the Beat movement).
November 5, 2014
Overall an interesting, serious job, and the more controversial aspects of Burroughs's past and personality—such as his misogyny and his slaying of his wife—are squarely confronted.
February 1, 1990