The Outsiders: Critic Reviews

[Coppola's] revisions to the film, which include a new, improved soundtrack, invest it with grandeur worthy of both its characters and his own ambitions.

There's not much life in this movie, or spontaneity. It's a stylistic exercise.

The film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides.

Well acted and crafted but highly conventional.

A deeply strange film that gives '60s hoodlums the personalities of Care Bears and places them under constant attack from preppies in pastel sweaters.

Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

Francis Coppola's revision of his 1983 film of S.E. Hinton's best seller The Outsiders is funny, touching and revelatory.

Coppola's take on S.E. Hinton's classic. Teens+.

As a movie, it's mediocre. As a clue to Coppola's thinking, it shows he still has things to learn about the relation between technology and expression.

A devouring CinemaScope fever dream: an homage to Robert Wise and Nicholas Ray that took its chief inspiration from the timeless backlit twilights of Gone with the Wind.

Flawed though it might be, it's still an exciting piece of film made by an innovative director who was firing on all cylinders.

Lightly likeable.

The new cut of "The Outsiders" aptly entitled "The Complete Novel" expands what existed before to such a degree that the framework of the novel is restored...

While his film lacks the emotional conviction and psychological insight of Nicholas Ray's classic work, his grandiose vision pays off in some stunning camerawork.

The Outsiders was relatively cheap, and also brought Coppola back to a kind of human drama that his post-Godfather work had been lacking, the result enrapturing a good number of teens and pre-teens in the 1980s.

Gorgeously photographed teen drama with a strong cast

extremely well-filmed and acted

Coppola's dream version of S E Hinton's popular novelette is cast with the stars of tomorrow and takes us to the other side of that rainbow.

One hell of a powerful movie. The young cast are dynamite.