Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★ 6

  “People who confuse brains with luck can get in a whole lot of trouble. Seeing through the game is not the same as winning the game.”

  A genuinely provocative movie about the soul of the individual being subsumed by the gears of corporate arrogance and structural intractability that’s also about dudes crushing beers and ripping heaters. Americana, for better and worse.

• 

  Review by Blake Bergman "Various Spaghetti" ★★★½ 2

  "North Dallas Forty" is a 1979 Sports Drama directed by Ted Kotcheff. Before it was incepted theatrically, "North Dallas Forty" was a 1973 best-seller written by Peter Gent. Gent himself was a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys. The book and then eventual film were referential Gent's experience in the league, something that naturally comes with some immaculate highs but also crushing blows of reality in terms of lows. In that respect of things, "North Dallas Forty" is very much a portrait of the older gritting teeth days of the sport when it first made that conceptional jump into the larger spotlight of the public eye.

  Don't get me wrong, the NFL has been around considerable time before this film,…

• 

  Review by pirateneckbeard ★★★★ 10

  This was a dark cerebral social commentary sports film that felt gritty and was unabashed in its mission statement. Surprisingly it held me intrigued throughout it's running time with Nick Nolte just giving an amazing performance of a damaged athlete having to deal with the social hoops of the game while suffering from the problems of physically putting up with the agony of the daily pains the sport perpetrates on his body. Hands down one of the best sports movies I have seen and is worthy of checking out. Sure it has some lurid dialogue and story elements but I feel it tackles this grid iron head on. I'm going to give it an extra half star for being remarkable in it's sports field.

• 

  Review by ~findlay ★★★★★

  Ted Kotcheff has this incredible ability to make manly films for men, and in them, demonize the idea of masculinity. Like adding an extra ingredient to a curry, changing its colour and taste from what it shows in glossy, (now thumbprinted) recipe book pages.

  ::Wake In Fright - a psychological journey into the extremities of men::
  ::First Blood - the mental tragedy of death and the soldier::
  ::North Dallas Forty - the physical toll of masculinity::

  Pain is real//You cannot fucking hide from it

  scars. casts. pills. bone pops. broken teeth. noseblood. fist-cracks. tape. needles. novocaine. beer. icebaths. cigarettes. fists. dirt.

  The twisting of the physical form is real. You ~feel~ this film. Everyones breaking down. chipped away. One bad…

• 

  Review by Ziglet_mir ★ 8

  I suppose I'm being a bit of a curmudgeon on this one, but other than the last 30 minutes this flick sorta just glides along in a tailspin of 60s-70s anti-hero smugness. Nick Nolte does a commendable job with the material, but he's almost better as the grizzled, uninterpretable hot mess we know him as today. The good parts? That would be the football sequences, a few plays run inside a gymnasium and then more shown on the big game on the field. I get that being based on the real life Cowboys teams of the early 70s the focus is more on the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, but this actually would have been a way better film if it took the…

• 

  Review by Colin the dude ★★★★½ 2

  The Slap Shot of 70s football but I'd go so far as the Avatar of 70s football. It's like you're stepping into an alternate reality so authentic that you could breathe the air and smell the stale beer. Nick Nolte stretching and cracking his back in quiet agony is like watching the big tree in Avatar buckle in majestic pain. Stunning evocation. And the gyms. The dirty 70s gyms. The montage of dudes working out with ancient machinery and then cracking a coca-cola afterward. The football vernacular. The hangout vibes. Charles Durning yelling. This film is historical document.

• 

  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★½ 1

  Kotcheff basically trying to move the winning, and profane, Slap Shot formula over to football and it mostly works, thanks to Nick Nolte -- that all said, this has no right being 119 minutes long

• 

  Review by williamfaeleith ★★★★ 2

  An old-fashioned, testosterone-fuelled, 70s sports film. A brutal satire on the American Football franchises of the 70s where players were well paid and lived a hedonistic macho lifestyle, but were thought of as just 'part of the equipment' by the rich owners of the club.
  Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte) is an ageing player with 'the best hands in football', but now finds himself on the bench with a broken body through years of playing through injuries, made possible by having to use numbing injections.
  His contempt for authority constantly brings him into conflict with the coaches and owners of the team.
  Ted Kotcheff does a good job in realistically portraying the members of the team and their interactions with each other, their management and their opponents.
  Nolte does a very good job of making you feel every ache and pain of his injury-ravaged body.

• 

  Review by Jacob Knight ★★★★

  A seminal entry in the Dudes Rock Cinema canon. Two hours of Nick Nolte smoking, drinking, snorting, fucking, playing football, and trying not to get killed by Bo Svenson. Can’t believe it took me forty years to finally see this.

• 

  Review by DBC ★★★★½ 1

  Fear & Loathing in North Dallas Forty has been brought to you by roid rage, cheap beer & smokes, and the word fuck

  A battered, exhausted Nick Nolte drinking a Budweiser and smoking a cigarette on an exercise machine inside his football team's packed gym with nobody batting an eye because a lot of 'em are doing the exact same thing---that to me is the defining image of North Dallas Forty.

  I'm tempted to say you could read something deep into that scene, something about American burnout at the end of the 70s after a truly tumultuous decade… but this movie is based on a true story, a semi-autobiographical football novel written by a former Dallas Cowboy who played under Tom Landry…

• 

  Review by Quiller ★★★ 2

  If I’m ever on the verge of caring about pro football, I’ll watch this movie again and move on with my life. I’m not sure if that was director-cowriter Ted Kotcheff’s goal, but his film serves as a damning indictment of the exploitative practices team owners, coaches, and doctors engage in when dealing with players. Nick Nolte stars as an aging wide receiver for the fictional North Dallas Bulls. Nolte’s body is falling apart. He’s being pumped full of pain killers in order to play each Sunday. He knows his time is limited, but football is the only thing he knows how to do. And there are still the highs that come from making incredible plays. Then, he starts dating…

• 

  Review by Sonic Temple ★★★★★

  Not only do I absolutely love watching North Dallas Forty, but I also love name-dropping it.

  Everyone should see this film. For my money it is the greatest sports movie of all-time, but more importantly it may very well be the most honest film ever made. So many of the little moments resonate with such validity whether they be about sports or sports as a metaphor for life.

  Phil Elliott is also the fucking coolest and his closing monologue will forever make my eyes water.