Popular reviews

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 6

  Before becoming famous and building a name for himself with not one, but two classic sports films, John G. Avildsen contributed to the easygoing and somewhat experimental counterculture cinema pioneered by films like Easy Rider, though one might argue that this picture has a more clear storyline.

  The film also seems to have a legacy in that Peter Boyle was so disheartened by watching people cheering for all the violence that he refused to participate in films that glorified violence for a time, forcing him to lose the role of Popeye in The French Connection, which would later earn Gene Hackman an Oscar. And, to be honest, I don't see why, since the violence in this film isn't particularly demoralizing;…

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★½ 41

  It's colder than a witch's tit.

  This could be the most politically important film ever made. Joe is the conglomerative result of the rich elites, the American family, the hippie counterculture, and the counter counterculture thrown into the melting pot that is the great democratic experiment and showcases the fragmentation of society that had began (continued?) losing its way during the tumultuous 60s. The film and filmmakers may be taking digs at the good ol’ US of A but there are many ongoing factors and tons of individual idiosyncrasies that matter in the overall analysis. 

  While we can make one-dimensional character comparisons of those seen in the film to political groups today, this is not what makes Joe relevant. The film…

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  Review by Swartacus ★★★★½ 12

  "Joe, would you like to see where my kind of animal hangs out?

  The American shmoe. How far out of his cave has he bear crawled? Has he tasted freedom? Has he made it to the bar with the ice in urinals yet? If he has, he's certainly been eighty-sixed more times than anyone can recall. Why don’t movies have theme songs that sound like Hill Street Blues anymore? This movie looks like it was shot for a dollar and I love it.

  Joe is squirmingly poignant, potently sappy and gloriously sloppy. Business was business in 1970 and Sarandon's tits are already out. It’s all just a beautiful ad for Mr. Bubble, a dream built to last. Juxtapose Raggedy Ann…

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  Review by HKFanatic ★★★★ 11

  I'm wrapping up Quentin Tarantino's new book on film, "Cinema Speculation," and knew I had to make time for John G. Avildsen's "Joe" after Tarantino's memorable description of a screening he attended as a young child. This is a raw, unapologetically ugly picture, a far cry from the classics like "Rocky" and "Karate Kid" that one associates with Avildsen. Granted, the version I rented looked pretty awful—the image was in standard definition and appeared cropped and playing at the wrong framerate—but even so, "Joe's" world of dingy apartments and low-level drug hustlers makes one want to avert their eyes, to the point that you're glad when Peter Boyle's Joe enter the pictures, as hateful as he is, simply because his…

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  Review by Sean Baker 3

  Watched the Olive Films Blu-ray

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  Review by Timcop ★★★★ 7

  The kind of "comedy" that could only come out of the 70's: couched in layers of tragic irony and loaded with despicable cretins whose ignorance and selfishness leads to their own (at least moral) downfall. JOE kind of threw me for a loop as I had no idea what direction it was headed and Peter Boyle's titular character is so disgusting that you realize that the movie isn't on anyone's side (except maybe Susan Sarandon's). And boy does Boyle pull out all the stops in his authentic and fairly riveting take on general hateful dumbassery. The tagline "Keep America Beautiful" could easily be swapped out with another famous tagline about America in the remake.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★½

  "Forty-two percent of all liberals are queer, that's a fact. The Wallace people did a poll."

  similar to something like The Little Murders, what may have come off as darkly comical in the 70s feels like a horror movie a few decades later where the more outlandish aspects of its problematic characters have only been emboldened with time which makes it only harder to reconcile the sociopathic, racist and hateful tendencies of the title character - unlike other antiheroes of the decade (most notably Travis Bickle), Joe's acts of wonton violence are motivated out of his detest for humanity solely; perhaps that is an apt mirror of American culture five decades ago and unfortunately applicable today, but that doesn't make it much easier to swallow, even if Boyle is quite good at playing an irredeemable piece of shit

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  Review by DallasFrance ★★★★

  WOAH BOY. Joe drops us into 1970 with a body slam from the top turnbuckle of racism, homophobia, and all of the other -isms and phobias. Five minutes in and it’s gentlemen, start your epithets! John G. Avildsen would later direct The Karate Kid; let’s just say that Joe would not have green-lit that project. He’s more of a Death Wish, Dressed to Kill, and Birth of a Nation type. (Joe can’t stand hippies, either, but I can’t think of a film other than maybe Easy Rider for that)

  One of the more fascinating aspects about Joe is how it fits into the “inclusion doesn’t equal endorsement” conversation. Just because Avildsen made a film where the protagonist is a raging bigot…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★ 2

  Very crude but ingenuous exploitation of every possible 1970 paranoia generational and class related. A rich text if not much of a movie. Dave Kehr’s capsule written when the movie was probably around a decade old mentions that it had likely dated in a grotesque way and that is probably part of the appeal now as a window into lots of ugly fantasies. It is a shame Avildsen direction lacks more punch. I had forgotten how much Boyle’s casting on Taxi Driver was intended as reference to his work on this one. Screenwriter Norman Weixler also did Serpico, Mandingo and Saturday Night Fever, that must be one of the wildest run of titles from this period of American movies.

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  Review by Karl ★★★½ 3

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Jack Often ★ 1

  Sadly I didn't enjoy watching this. The film delights way too long in letting its reactionary id run wild with a lot of incendiary dialogue, yet at the same time takes forever to ramp up the stakes of the boring central relationship. As satire it's all bark and little bite. Worse, it frequently steps on its own moments of suspense.
  Centering Dennis Patrick as an everyman who we're meant to find some common ground with left me cold. And thanks to Peter Boyle's performance, the film's ideas about class distinction bloomed into such a wrong-headed but enduring stereotype about blue-collar workers in American life that it's hard to take pleasure in it. Boyle himself was so repulsed by audience reactions…

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  Review by Frances Meh ★★★

  Get in loser we’re going upstate to kill the dirty hippies who stole our giant bag of drugs while we were busy providing deeply unsatisfying sexual experiences to girls half our age