Metacritic reviews

But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.

A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.

Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.

A suitably jazzy, sexy, entertainment.

Kaprisky, as the young French student, is an unknown in a role too large and complex for her, and there are times when she seems lost in a scene, looking to Gere for guidance. The result is a stylistic exercise without any genuine human concerns we can identify with - and yet, an exercise that does have a command of its style, is good-looking, fun to watch, and develops a certain morbid humor.

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

In keeping with the tentativeness of the entire enterprise, the ending is one of the great cop-outs in modern moviedom.

McBride's presentation of Richard Gere is frankly pornographic, perhaps the only way to handle this Victor Mature of the 80s; Valerie Kaprisky costars—meekly.

A gaudy erotic showcase for a male stripper named Richard Gere. A couple of feebleminded heads were put together on this would-be-torrid production, a kind of glorified featurette for Playgirl subscribers. [13 May 1983, p.B1]

BREATHLESS may attract attention because of the ample display of Richard Gere, but it is a hollow, cynically exploitive film. [23 May 1983]