Popular reviews

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★ 3

  "Do you think they can cure this fire? Do you know what they have to cure? She wants to leave the mark of her desire on every living creature in the world."

  Hired as an occupational therapist in training at an upscale psychiatric hospital by Dr. Bea Brice (Kim Hunter), aimless young veteran Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) gradually loses his grip on reality after becoming moonstruck over ethereal nymphomaniac patient Lilith Arthur (Jean Seberg). Peter Fonda features more often than I'd prefer as Lilith's suicidal, nebbishy lapdog Stephen Evshevsky. Jessica Walter and Gene Hackman also pop up in an extraneous cameo as a dysfunctional married couple.

  Based on a 1961 novel by J.R. Salamanca, Lilith is the final feature to…

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  Review by Captain Quint ★★★

  Oh if only Warren Beatty had been a stronger actor, and was able to bring some nuance to the part of Vincent - the war vet who takes a job at a sanitarium and gets too involved with a female patient. If he was able to convey the idea of a man going from point A to point B during the course of the film – and gradually falling to ruin after betraying his core principals - this movie might have had more of a punch. The director, Robert Rossen, felt that “Vincent's progression from "normality" into psychosis was unconvincing because Beatty's acting implied psychosis from the start.” I agree, and because of this, the damage he causes at the…

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★★

  "What's so wonderful about reality?"

  Lost and aimless after serving in war, Vincent (Warren Beatty) returns to his small home town seeking to quell his inner turmoil and find some sense of peace and belonging. He takes a job at a private mental institution that caters to the financially well off as an occupational therapist and falls hard for one of the patients (Jean Seberg). 

  What follows is a fascinating dissection of the romantic ideal and how it is entangled with socially constructed expectations. The dynamic between them is clearly wrong and Vincent knows it. As an employee the last thing he should be doing is becoming romantically involved with someone under the facility's care. It turns out, however, thar…

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  Review by chavel ★

  Lilith is the kind of movie that can lead you to believe that Warren Beatty didn’t have talent until he made “Bonnie & Clyde” (1967). Interesting premise is obliterated in no time: Beatty is an occupational trainee therapist with an individual emptiness. Unbelievably, he had to be talked into taking the job. (Really, is it true there was a time in history you could go to a job interview with reluctance... and still land the position?) He actually tells his bosses that he is attracted to their patient Lilith (Jean Seberg) who is schizophrenic and sexually non-selective. And yet they let Beatty continue in giving her overabundant care, with field trip privileges, all the while he appears to neglect the other institution patients. Guess what? This is a packaged love story. At the film’s disposal is splendid black & white cinematography but it cannot make up for story phoniness and the drone in Beatty’s pitch in delivering dialogue.

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½

  This is an odd one, I'm ambivalent.

  1) Warren Beatty - Jean Seberg - Peter Fonda in 1964 is like a template for post-Beat/proto New American Cinema.

  2) The narrative hook that allows the movie to exist is "psychological thriller", but nothing in the first ninety minutes does much to advance that story, and it's only during the last half hour that you begin to see the movie's central psych narrative take shape. All the striving-for-Bergman pseudo-profundity in the dialogue, talking around big ideas without ever saying anything meaningful, is a red herring, while the real conceptual action is... elsewhere. It's unfortunate that you have to watch people bloviate for so long; that could easily turn a person off of…

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  Review by gregs1999 ★★★

  Dude really went to work at his local asylum just so he can get some pussay. I know he didn’t, but it’s kinda funny he chose to do that.

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  Review by nora ★★★★½ 2

  i fully did not recognize peter fonda until about a half hour into this because since when is peter fonda getting cast as an erudite whittler who wears boxy glasses?? jean seberg and warren beatty are both so good here, and the subtle european stylistic flourishes really add to the unsettling nature of their relationship. also this cast is batshit, it also includes a young jessica walter and gene hackman sporting a southern accent that was clearly....a choice....

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  Review by Sonny_Jim ★★★½

  I liked it. I could tell pretty early on this had to be based on a book. Beatty's character spends a lot of time in his own head, but that didn't bother me. That he's not constantly spewing dialogue gave the movie time to breathe and his character a bit of mystery.

  Crazy to see so many names in this who would go on to have long careers -- Jessica Walter and Gene Hackman play a young married couple, Rene Auberjonois pops up for less than a minute, and Peter Fonda (of all people) gives maybe the best performance I've seen from him as Lilith's fellow patient and obsessive admirer. But the movie belongs to Seberg and Beatty.

  Renaissance Faires were apparently a thing in 1964. Who knew?

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  Review by Jim Dooley ★★★

  LILITH is a better-than-average film, but it could have been so much stronger.  It tries so hard to “shock” the audience, yet it does that by sensationalizing what happens until it shatters believability.  This was especially notable in the second half which had me frequently shaking my head.
     
  The opening is promising.  As Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) arrives seeking employment at a mental hospital for patients with well-heeled families, he’s seen by Lilith (Jean Seberg) through a window’s security netting.  The impression gave me the feeling of a spider waiting patiently for the arrival of a fly.  This is reinforced when another patient warns him to “Get out of here.”
    
  The set-up seeks to gain empathy by…

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  Review by Travis Clark ★★★½ 7

  I always love a movie that sucks me in with little to no exposition, no expectations of where we could be headed. It could go off in an unsatisfactory direction, but until it does it has me hooked, and thankfully this one got better as it went for me.

  Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) is a young man, quietly back in town for an unclear period of time from an unspecified war, when he heads down to the local sanitarium to volunteer and learn the ropes from the head of the place, Dr. Bea Brice (Kim Hunter). Working there the young man deals with many of those committed there, but mostly revolving around quiet Stephen Evshevsky (Peter Fonda) and the enigmatic…

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  Review by trolleyfreak ★★★½

  *Trolley's 2018 Watchlist [#8/100]*

  'Help me..' (Warren Beatty as Vincent Bruce)

  Brief Synopsis: Trainee therapist (Beatty) falls under the spell of a schizophrenic patient (Jean Seberg) at a private mental institution.

  Verdict: Robert Rossen died in 1966 believing his last film - an adaptation of a novel by J.R. Salamanca - to be a failure but that most certainly isn't the case; the direction and dialogue (both by Rossen), cinematography (by veteran Eugen Schüfftan who had won an Oscar for his work on the director's previous film The Hustler), and jazzy musical score (courtesy of Kenyon Hopkins whose work graced films of the standard of Elia Kazan's Baby Doll and Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men) are all of the very…

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  Review by dankwit

  say what you will about warren beatty's performance in this (I've seen multiple people who've partially blamed it for robert rossen's premature death soon thereafter 😳), but don't forget to give him credit for apparently feeling the need to almost sacrifice his career in service of importing the aesthetics of the nouvelle vague to hollywood

  this stretches credulity a bit with its treatment of mental illness, but is noirish enough for me to suspend disbelief. insanely good cast full of young turks in roles that diverge from their future personas (jessica walter and gene hackman as an unhappy married couple! peter fonda as a nebbish! rene auberjonois in a walk-on as an equestrian! beatty as someone who hesitates before filling every vagina he encounters!). jean seberg, as the title character, really gets to show off her acting chops like i'd never seen them before...she's definitely the mvp