70
Metascore
11 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The New York TimesVincent CanbyThe New York TimesVincent CanbyThe most moving, the most intelligent, the most humane--oh, to hell with it!--it's the best American film I've seen this year.
- The director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate is more at home with minute personal tensions than with the epic hysteria this project required, so file the film under botched masterpieces.
- 75Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertNichols has done the same thing in Catch-22 that he did in The Graduate. He's given us a funny beginning, then switched tones and gone serious. And then tacked on a Great Escape ending which answers none of the questions he's so painfully raised.
- 75The A.V. ClubNathan RabinThe A.V. ClubNathan RabinIt's a flawed film, hampered by weird tonal shifts and an overpopulated cast. But, 31 years later, Catch-22's chilliness seems forgivable, its vision of a military (and a nation) ruled by gung-ho capitalists, shameless opportunists, and evil yes-men as prescient and incisive as ever.
- 60Time OutTime OutThough the vertiginously absurdist logic of the book is hopelessly fractured, some of it does filter through (the mostly superb performances are a great help). Nichols unfortunately grafts on a Meaningful Statement by way of a ponderous Fellini-ish sequence in which Yossarian, on leave in Rome, finds himself wandering the seventh circle of hell.
- Memorable images. Immemorable film.
- 50New York Magazine (Vulture)New York Magazine (Vulture)As Catch-22 limps along from vignette to vignette, one sees that what it lacks is cohesion, style and essential mood. [29 June 1970, p.54]
- 50The New YorkerPauline KaelThe New YorkerPauline KaelThere are startling effects and good revue touches here and there, but the picture goes on and on, as if it were determined to impress us. It goes on so long that it cancels itself out, even out of people's memories; it was long awaited and then forgotten almost instantly.
- 50TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineThis film wants to be bleak, nihilistic, and darkly hilarious but Catch-22 emerges as an exercise in frustration for those unprepared for Nichols's episodic, detached, and surreal treatment of the novel. Like a nightmare, the film shifts from one bizarre episode to another, with Alan Arkin's dazed Yossarian reacting to the madness that surrounds him, but second only to the viewer.