TV Guide Magazine

Kubrick's liberal, anti-authoritarian reading of Anthony Burgess's very Catholic allegorical novel is morally confused but tremendously powerful... No serious moviegoer can afford to ignore it.

Empire by Kim Newman

A much-maligned and misunderstood classic, this is one of Kubrick's finest movies.

Chicago Tribune by Gene Siskel

Kubrick's contributions are his wit and his eye. The wit, too much at times, is as biting as in "Dr. Strangelove," and the production, while of another order, is as spectacular as in "2001." [11 Feb 1972]

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

It demands thought, compels the attention, and refuses to be dismissed. And, for that reason, A Clockwork Orange must be considered a landmark of modern cinema.

Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten

A chilling classic, the movie is a scabrous satire about human deviance, brutality, and social conditioning that has remained a visible part of the ongoing public debate about violence and the movies.

Empire by Simon Braund

Ethical screed aside, what does A Clockwork Orange have to offer beyond its curiosity value and a crash course in humanism? Well, for a start there's Kubrick's dazzling visual style which, rather in the manner that Trainspotting did 25 years later, translates the substance of an "unfilmable" book into the language of cinema. And at the dramatic core of the film is a simply astonishing performance by Malcolm MacDowell as Alex. It also features an orgy sequence that would have had Von Stroheim laughing his jackboots off — you'll certainly never listen to the William Tell Overture in quite the same way again. And as for Singin' In The Rain...

The Guardian by Derek Malcolm

It is not a film the memory of which you will exactly wish to cherish. You may even, like me, reject the glib and icy pessimism of its message. But you will, I can assure you, find it difficult to put out of mind.

Slant Magazine by Jeremiah Kipp

If you watch Clockwork Orange and see that this is the game Kubrick is playing with us, giving us an avenue into understanding a corrosion of society, the film may be appreciated as his finest masterwork in a career full of them. Certainly, it’s his most human film, right next to Lolita in its refusal to judge its central character’s sickness.

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

Kubrick's liberal, anti-authoritarian reading of Anthony Burgess's very Catholic allegorical novel is morally confused but tremendously powerful... No serious moviegoer can afford to ignore it.

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at... Because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual--and disorienting--movie experience.

Time by Staff (Not Credited)

The confounding thing, and perhaps the ultimate irony of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, is that Alex is surprisingly but undeniably engaging.

Village Voice by Michael Atkinson

The first punk tragicomedy, a chain-whipped cartoon meditation on Good, Evil, and Free Will that is as seductive as it is tasteless. That Kubrick misjudged the distance between comedy and cruelty seems to be unarguable.

Variety

A brilliant nightmare... The film employs outrageous vulgarity, stark brutality and some sophisticated comedy to make an opaque argument for the preservation of respect for man's free will - even to do wrong.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.