Straw Dogs

Variety by

Director Sam Peckinpah indulges himself in an orgy of unparalleled violence and nastiness with undertones of sexual repression in this production.

Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen

One of the most ambiguous, neurotic, and disturbing of all American films.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

Straw Dogs has the heat of personal commitment and the authority of deep (if bitter) contemplation. It is also moviemaking of a very high order.

Slant Magazine by Nick Schager

Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.

The New Yorker by Pauline Kael

Despite Peckinpah’s artistry, there’s something basically grim and crude in Straw Dogs. It’s no news that men are capable of violence, but while most of us want to find ways to control that violence, Sam Peckinpah wants us to know that that’s all hypocrisy.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The most offensive thing about the movie is its hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on the moral outrage with a shovel.

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Though studio interference and his own personal demons hampered his later work, Straw Dogs shows a master in control of his effects, which made an artist of Peckinpah's sensibility an especially dangerous man.

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.