Opiniões dos críticos

This is bull of a very high order. Ferrara comes from the raffish fringes of film-making... and the new work's metaphysical aspirations have a hollow ring. But he's also a skilful film-maker, masterly at building character and mood with minimal, understated means. And the nakedness (in both senses) and anguish of Keitel's performance are unquestionable.

If I had to choose the most important films of the 1990s, within the top three would probably be Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant... It is boldly NC-17, but unlike most exploitation cinema, Ferrara can’t seem to help himself from making the film a personal, frightened psychic diary, a pitiful shriek for help, and a powerful statement about how even the damned can achieve a moment of fleeting grace.

Ferrara’s tale of sin and redemption has a raw, unvarnished power that’s embodied by Keitel’s performance, and the years have preserved it as an equally potent street-level look at a city.

Far from those films that are content to illustrate an explicit situation with more or less original incidents, Bad Lieutenant works upon the slow translation of an affect of agony within the form of an image-story. This is why the film is significant: it considers the image not only as a plastic entity but above all as a spiritual exercise.

Quite possibly Ferrara's finest hour, with an almost unbearably sincere performance from Keitel.

Most of all, this character study is a showcase for Keitel. It's a brave, unbound performance that frequently has him howling in inarticulate guttural sobs. It's an impressive tour de force, at times almost too impressive... ["Bad Lieutenant"] is not for all tastes. Certainly, it is not “appealing.” But what it lacks in charm, it compensates for with audacity and single-mindedness of vision.

This punishing film... [is] an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch.

It seems to me that Ferrara is an artist of the profane; his Catholicism looks suspiciously like a Scorsese hand-me-down. In this exploitation/art movie, it may just be that the truth is in the sleaze.

["Bad Lieutenant"] is not a "dirty movie," and in fact takes spirituality and morality more seriously than most films do. And in the bad lieutenant, Keitel has given us one of the great screen performances in recent years.

Ferrara's strength as a filmmaker has always been his unreflective willingness to go too far, to push his characters and situations to an extreme that brushes past the ridiculous to flirt with the sublime... But "Bad Lieutenant," with its ambitious themes and bookish metaphors, suggests that a fatal self-consciousness has begun to creep into Ferrara's work, threatening to strip him of his spontaneity and enthusiastic excess... Luckily, Keitel makes up in the heat of performance what Ferrara sacrifices to the coolness of art.

There's an undeniable formal elegance in the way Ferrara... frames and holds certain shots, and Keitel certainly gives his all in this 1992 entry in the "Raging Bull" redemptive sweepstakes. But I must confess I kept thinking of a friend's response to this movie—that it made him feel glad, even proud, not to be straight.

Ferrara and Lund connect with the bone-chilling scariness of the addict’s world, and the film is never less than compelling... [Keitel] keeps us watching his descent without wanting to look away. Only an actor with tremendous reserves of power could accomplish that.