Popular reviews

• 

  Review by threepenny ★★★ 1

  Sort of like It's a Wonderful Life, but instead of an angel, he gets sepsis. Gregory Peck is going to live a great life, see the world, be a writer, and while doing it he meets and falls in love with Ava Gardner in a smoke-filled, dingy, Parisian dance hall. Their relationship is a portrait of two people who love each other but aren't compatible, and the cruelty they inflict on each other because of it. When she finally leaves, she does it like a knife to the gut, leaving him to bleed out the rest of his life. Then he meets Hildegard Knef, playing a beautiful countess, and here's another portrait, this time of a fun relationship that doesn't…

• 

  Review by noir1946 ★★½ 3

  Like The Klllers, The Snows of Kilimanjaro takes a Hemingway short story and expands it considerably by providing back stories for the characters, borrowing, sort of, from other Hemingway works. Unlike The Klllers, it’s a mostly unsatisfying effort. It’s also the second of three Hemingway adaptations for Ava Gardner, with each declining in quality after The Killers, ending in the truly dismal The Sun Also Rises, in which all the actors, with the notable exception of Bob Evans, are much too old for their characters. This is also Greg Peck’s second Hemingway effort after the mostly excellent The Macomber Affair, which covers much of the same African territory as what Hemingway dismissed as The Snows of Zanuck, suggesting it represents…

• 

  Review by Rick Burin ★

  A boring, unconvincing and thematically incoherent version of the Hemingway story, with a thoroughly dislikeable Gregory Peck bitterly recalling his relationship with Ava Gardner - though never once mentioning her terrible hairstyle.

  It's all rather ugly to look at, with the sloppy pasting together of location footage and studio shots giving the whole enterprise an insultingly slapdash feel.

  Bernard Herrmann's beautiful score is the film's only plus point. Just listen to that instead, while doing the washing up or something.

• 

  Review by lacci ★★★½ 2

  2 stars for the plot but 5 stars for gregory peck and ava gardner being sexy as hell

• 

  Review by lizzie ★★★½

  Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck sharing a match in a smokey jazz club in Paris is one of the hottest things ever put to celluloid

• 

  Review by Sophie Farrell ★★★

  This review may contain spoilers!

  Ernest Hemingway was one of the most popular and influential novelists of the 20th century. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his novels were mined by Hollywood, with several popular and successful films based on his books being released. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, at the time of its release, was a very popular film. However, unlike other Hemingway adaptations, The Snows of Kilimanjaro isn't as well regarded by fans of the author's work now as it was when it was first released. Despite not being too familiar with Hemingway's original novel, I've been interested in checking out The Snows of Kilimanjaro due to the cast featuring many actors that I like.…

• 

  Review by AJ ★★★

  The Snows of Kilimanjaro has an incredible cast, gorgeous mid-century production design, an evocative score by Bernard Herrmann, and exciting cinematography - especially in the segments that take place in Africa. However, it never approaches what makes Hemingway's short story so compelling. It suffers from what could have been, at least in my eyes.

• 

  Review by Blaze the Action Junkie ★

  I've been trying to get through this one in spurts over the last couple of days. I wished it was about climbing a mountain, but I wouldn't be so lucky. The film is about the thoughts and final events of a man dying of sepsis in the African savanna in sight of mount Kilimanjaro. For most of the first two acts we're led through a series of the protagonist's memories involving two women that look the same. To add to the confusion there's no real sign for where in the protagonists memory we are leading to easy time-line confusion, adjusted simply by assuming we're moving forward through his memory but then still more confusing when hints don't suggest so. I just wasn't a fan of this one, watching a man on his death bed is difficult enough, I don't care much for entire films about the subject.

  1952 Ranked
  1950's Ranked
  Romance films Ranked
  Dream Sequences Ranked

• 

  Review by Wes Edwards ★★ 2

  This is another of those movies, like Gone with the Wind, that was very popular in its day but is damn near unwatchable today.

  First - I utterly detest every single thing about Gone with the Wind - the book, the movie, everything. It sets my teeth on edge. And, no, I don’t even admire the craft of it, which is just empty and overdone spectacle in service of a shit-story. I’ve been studying US history since I was twelve years old and I know this moonlight-and-magnolias view of the Old South all too well. The fictional story in Gone with the Wind turns a romantic fantasy into a popular delusion of history.

  The Snows of Kilimanjaro has left less…

• 

  Review by TajLV ★★★

  Part of my 5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films (8) challenge.

  I read Ernest Hemingway's short story back in high school, so I don't remember a lot of detail. And I can't say I was ever a fan of the writer, but I do recall how the story ended and it was NOT like this. In fact, director Henry King and his scriptwriter Casey Robinson took a lot of liberties here in adapting the story to the big screen, and I'm not sure I agree with most of them.

  For example, the character called Cynthia Green who is played by Ava Gardner seems to be an expanded version of the first woman ever loved by world-traveling writer Harry Street (Gregory…

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★ 4

  A dull book report, heavy on Hemingway's signifiers and low on understanding them. At its best when it plays off on King's sub Vidor relationship with nature but even that isn't quite as convincing in the middle of Fox gloss. I mostly have simpathy for the current attempts of Henry King revisionism coming from European Auteurist quarters, but those big literary adaptations don't help his cause.

• 

  Review by maneleeo ★★★

  Classic Hollywood starring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayword, and Ava Gardner, three stars of the Golden Age. It's almost like an adventure around the world, except the adventure part, it works well within the drama genre, using the artistic prowesses of its stars. As a writer contemplating the end, Harry Street gets a glimpse of the past, what he had, what he lost, what he loved, who was there with him. It has all the things one would hope to see on a novel by Hemingway, only it just feels to compressed for the scenes to actually have a greater meaning.