Bonnie and Clyde

The story’s simple; what’s complex... is its tragicomic tone: Director Arthur Penn channels the social unease of the ’60s through these folk heroes of the ’30s, allowing the counterculture to indulge a violent fantasy of social rebellion.

“Bonnie and Clyde” saved American cinema

An exciting, sometimes gruesomely humorous play on violence.

Depression-era America is a dust bowl of photogenic desperation; the savagery of Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree is only slightly disarmed by the gallows humour of the screenplay.

If it's possible for a film's ending to feel at once ambiguous and definitive, Bonnie and Clyde leaves the viewer feeling torn apart without necessarily knowing why. Its mix of lyricism, brutality, and ambivalence...

A few years ago, Truffaut, Godard and the Nouvelle Vague stole the gangster film from America and gave it new blood. Now Penn has taken it back home where it belongs, and in so doing has found a match for his temperament.

Bonnie and Clyde expanded the parameters of cinema through its precise melding of bold and exciting techniques, particularly signified by its world-class innovations in camerawork, editing, lighting, and sound.

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty excel as the gun-toting criminals who roamed the American Midwest during the Depression, while David Newman and Robert Benton's sizzling script and Arthur Penn's bravura direction are as fresh as ever.

Blew the doors open for depictions of violence in American cinema with a spasm of bloody, orgiastic beauty. Some say the movies have never recovered.

Even if it isn’t the crème de la crème of New Hollywood classics, it is still captivating as a showcase for a thrillingly original character.