Reception
Based on 14 reviews collected by the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 43% of critics gave White Sands a positive review, with an average rating of 4.9/10.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine wrote that the storyline was both predictable, and, when Lennox is revealed to be a CIA agent, utterly confusing. Most reviewers did feel that the film's highlights include work from cinematographer Peter Menzies and composer Patrick O'Hearn, but that neither man could make up for the problems with the script. As Desson Howe of the Washington Post wrote, it is never really explained why Dafoe's character has this obsession to find out the truth about Bob's death, or the various other unexplained oddities that occur in the film such as the fact that Mastrantonio falls in love with Dafoe's character for no apparent reason.
Leonard Maltin gives the film two stars and says it's "competently performed (even by Rourke) but with little else to distinguish it from dozens of its ilk”.
Read more about this topic: White Sands (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)