Cool Hand Luke: Critic Reviews

That traditional object of sorrow and compassion in American folk song and lore, the chain-gang prisoner, is given as strong a presentation as ever he has had on the screen.

A tough, honest film with backbone.

Stuart Rosenberg's direction is a horror, but the cast teems with so many familiar faces that this 1967 film can't help but entertain.

Newman gives an excellent performance, assisted by a terriffic supporting cast, including George Kennedy, outstanding as the unofficial leader of the cons who yields first place to Newman.

It's as fresh and effective in 2004 as it was in 1967.

A picture of chilling dramatic power.

...a gulag melodrama, if such a thing is possible.

Anchored by Paul Newman's thoroughly magnetic performance...

Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film's efforts to sentimentally "humanize" him by psychological revelation are clumsy.

The lines and the character have survived the film's oft-forgotten actual message.

Cool Hand Luke now seems more like a well-made entertainment than any kind of American masterpiece.

...most viewers will have little failure understanding the movie and its motives. They communicate brilliantly.

One of those movies you remember Great Moments from.

Too cool for words, then switches past midstream into a work of poignancy and power.

Paul Newman in his blue-eyed prime.

Preserves a time when one could not only get away with making an allegory with an existential hero, but stock it with an ensemble from the Actors Studio. [Blu-Ray]

Paul Newman and George Kennedy are at their best at this popular prison drama, which drew on the Depression era film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Quote to remember: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

Thematic ambivalence and episodic structure start to feel like major virtues: Cool Hand Luke is one of our most lived-in and pleasurably paced odes to nonconformity.

gorgeous looking and terrifically acted

A caustically witty look at the American South and its still-surviving chain gangs, with Newman in fine sardonic form as the boss-baiter who refuses to submit and becomes a hero to his fellow-prisoners.

An amazing accomplishment by Newman as the best fight man has left in him.

Classic anti-hero story still packs a punch.

Cool Hand Luke rivals only One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as the best movie ever made about men locked up.