The Graduate: Critic Reviews

Makes you feel a little tearful and choked-up while it is making you laugh yourself raw.

It is a good topical movie whose time has passed

Few movies have communicated with such dark hilarity all the anxiety and flamboyant misery of youthful sexual initiation

What I don't enjoy is the cruelty, the glib mindlessness, and the insulated, pampered narcissism that makes the whole thing possible.

A delightful, satirical comedy-drama.

A simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde.

The screenplay, which begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama.

Influential coming-of-age sex comedy.

A safe and calculated popular landmark film.

Here's to you, Mrs Robinson.

Rather a shame it's so often mistaken for a statement about something beyond the milk-fed adolescent blues.

Mike Nichols' seminal film at once reflected the generation gap and also widened it, giving youths a clear voice, indigenous music, villains (all adults), and a sympathtic anti-hero, played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman in a career-making turn.

I couldn't get past the fact what a tool Benjamin Braddock was.

...plastics, an apt description for the artificial people and attitudes around him.

Nichols takes an ad hoc approach to comic irony and the movie seems to have been enshrined by American audiences because each moment in isolation "works," no matter that they tend to cancel each other out.

The film itself is very broken-backed, partly because Anne Bancroft's performance as the mother carries so much more weight than Katharine Ross' as the daughter, partly because Nichols couldn't decide whether he was making a social satire or a farce.

All the indie imitators that have come later still can't touch this hilarious and biting classic.

A rare movie that captures a societal zeitgeist with humor, drama and biting satire.

Here's to you Mrs Robinson....and Mike Nichols

The post-college burnout feeling that continues to resonate with audiences today. A comedy of tragedy, in which a man's youthful idealism is dealt its inevitable deathblow.

Hoffman may be a trifle too old for the role, but the movie's still amazing.