The Oscar-winning director of “The Deer Hunter” died Saturday at age 77
“The Sicilian” (1987)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 13 percent
“The film is a mess, though hardly on the panoramic scale of ‘Heaven’s Gate,’” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times.
“The Sunchaser” (1996)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 17 percent
“Michael Cimino — a daredevil director for whom the tidy story is never worth shooting — pokes around interesting themes of mysticism, healthy (and unhealthy) lifestyles, bonds between men, and the joys of driving in the desert really recklessly but doesn’t know what to do with what he finds. Nothing jells,” Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in Entertainment Weekly.
“Desperate Hours” (1990)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 36 percent
“It’s a variation on an old movie theme, but not much of a variation, and on a very tired theme,” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Heaven’s Gate” (1980)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 57 percent
“The longer version is impressive as long as the characters and settings remain in long shot; only when the camera gets closer do the problems start,” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader.
“The Year of the Dragon” (1985)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 60 percent
”’Year of the Dragon’ is so lacking in feeling, reason and narrative continuity that it furthers the impression left by ”Heaven’s Gate,’ and even by much of ‘The Deer Hunter,’ that Mr. Cimino’s insistence on working on a vast and extravagant scale is not matched by an ability to work articulately on any other,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times.
“Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (1974)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87 percent
“The Eastwood team has pulled off a modest enjoyable winner,” Howard Thompson wrote in the New York Times.
“The Deer Hunter” (1978)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93 percent
“It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood action pictures, yet it’s an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life — poetry of the commonplace,” Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker.
