Critical Reception
Although the film garnered the most commercial success of Warhol's films, reaction to it was mixed.
Roger Ebert reviewed the film in June 1967, and had a negative response to it, granting it one star out of four. In his review of the film, he stated "...what we have here is 3½ hours of split-screen improvisation poorly photographed, hardly edited at all, employing perversion and sensation like chili sauce to disguise the aroma of the meal. Warhol has nothing to say and no technique to say it with. He simply wants to make movies, and he does: hours and hours of them."
Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed the film in honor of its screening in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2002, and gave the film a positive review, stating "The tyranny of the camera is the oppression The Chelsea Girls records and imposes. No wonder it still seems radical, despite all we have seen onscreen and off since 1966."
TV Guide reviewed the film in December 2006, granting it four stars, calling it "fascinating, provocative, and hilarious" and "a film whose importance as a 1960s cultural statement outweighs any intrinsic value it may have as a film."
Internet film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has the film ranked as 57% "fresh", or positive, out of eight collected reviews.
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