Deliverance

It is also a finely structured allegory about America and Americans. But at least it works properly on a more basic level. It’s good to watch, and then to think about.

The movie casts a spell through images both ugly and beautiful, and other sounds, none of them really reflecting the idea of "nature in harmony." All here is dissonance, and the best one can do is find a thread of consolation within.

Each of the four lead performances is exceptional, none more so than Burt Reynolds' beefy, supercilious Lewis.

John Boorman's 1972 film of the James Dickey novel has a beautiful visual style that balances the film's machismo message.

It's the stuff of which slapdash oaters and crime programmers are made but the obvious ambitions of Deliverance are supposed to be on a higher plane.

This man-versus-nature story is also about man indulging his most uncivilized instincts, and in their various ways the four men on the canoe trip are transformed.

It is not meant to be "liked," and in a sense I didn't like it at all, but that made its power and control all the more convincing, and I greatly admire the film's single-minded intensity.

Anchored by some solid performances, strong direction, and a sharp aesthetic, “Deliverance” creates an atmosphere as threatening as it is beautiful and throws it’s characters right in the middle of it.

Deliverance is a classic film that nonetheless isn’t in the same league as poet James Dickey’s first (and only great) full-length fiction, a work as perfect in its way as, say, The Great Gatsby...

Not so much a cautionary tale as one of uncommon doggedness.