Black Orpheus(Orfeu Negro)

Variety by

Pic is somewhat cerebral, being mainly helped by the fresh playing of the cast, especially Yank actress Dawn. Color is excellent, and director Marcel Camus gives this movement. (Review of Original Release)

Washington Post by Ann Hornaday

A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

This sort of thing was considered high art not so long ago; now it seems forced and ponderously symbolic.

Village Voice by Michael Atkinson

Camus's film remains a revivifying experience - and a mid-winter oasis. Born and bred in France, Camus made other films, and lots of French TV, but Black Orpheus may still be the greatest one-hit-wonder import we've ever seen.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

A film that art-house audiences in 1959 loved madly. And who can blame them? A buoyant, searingly colorful retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de Janiero, writer-director's Marcel Camus' movie is a romance heightened by its backdrop.

Boston Globe by Wesley Morris

This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.