The Sicilian 1987

Vincent Canby, New York Times: The film is a mess, though hardly on the panoramic scale of Heaven's Gate. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: This is one of Cimino's best films, with a fine sense of spectacle and landscape. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: One of this film's big problems is that you can hardly see it. The foregrounds are dark and indistinct. The backgrounds are overlit and washed-out. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out: The dialogue is ponderously poetic, stilted and over-emphatic, characters are convenient cyphers, and both cutting and photography tend towards the bombastic. Folly, then, but gloriously inept and overblown. Read more

Variety Staff, Variety: The Sicilian represents a botched telling of the life of postwar outlaw leader Salvatore Giuliano. Read more

Hal Hinson, Washington Post: The Sicilian is unambiguously atrocious, but in that very special, howlingly grandiose manner that only a filmmaker with visions of epic greatness working on a large scale with a multinational cast can achieve. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: If Cimino had gone along with the campy nosedive this movie takes, Sicilian could have been to mob films what Blazing Saddles was to westerns. Read more