Reviews
After it premiered as 'Downtown '81' at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival reviews were mostly favorable. Variety called it “an extraordinary real-life snapshot of hip, arty, clubland Manhattan in the post-punk era.”
A rare movie review in Artforum said "Basquiat is a joy to watch. He floats through the movie with cool grace and unflagging energy; he's a natural in front of the lens..."
British Art Critic Adrian Searle wrote that “Downtown 81 captures that New York moment when punk, emerging rap, art school cool and the East Village art and music scenes were at their creative best.”
While the main appeal of the film seems to have been the art and music, some commentators also appreciated giving the modern viewer a peek at the decimated Lower East Side of 1980, saying "the real star of the film is the gritty milieu of a New York long gone", and that "New York Beat...conveys the vast gulf between Manhattan’s rich and the forgotten corners of the city, and the marginal existence of the artistic underground who tried to survive in between these worlds."
Read more about this topic: Downtown 81
Famous quotes containing the word reviews:
“When the reviews are bad I tell my staff that they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank.”
—Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919–1987)
“Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s. Different books—same reviews.”
—John Osborne (1929–1994)
“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)