40
The direction is agonisingly pedantic for a comedy, and leaves O'Neal and Reynolds totally exposed, mugging away in charmless and clumsy fashion.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
Bogdanovich is trying to do an interesting and commendable thing in dramatizing aesthetic passion; his failure is as noble as it is conspicuous.
70
Nickelodeon is Bogdanovich's sweet funny homage to the days before World War I when America played with its new toy, the movies, in those converted storefronts or jerry-built pantheons where for a nickel you could enter the new magic darkness of electric centuryIn that flickering, faintly salacious darkness, a new innocence was born. [27 Dec 1976, p.56]
75
Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles.
50
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
It sounds promising, but Bogdanovich attempts an exercise in style, and the result is sustained clutter.
50
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much.