Popular reviews

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  Review by Karsten ★★★★½ 8

  Me at the beginning of the film: Oh to be Burt Lancaster prancing through the woods in only a swim suit...

  Me by the end: Hey nevermind!

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★ 7

  GOD Burt Lancaster plays a man who has had some kind of break with reality and decides to deal with his midcentury, suburban, masculine ennui by taking a dip in every one of his neighbor's swimming pools on the way home.

  Based on a story by John Cheever, this movie is one of the first mainstream depictions of the condition that would later become known as "Don Draper Syndrome." This ailment can affect any extremely handsome, wealthy, and successful middle-aged American man who constantly cheats on their wife and is also an advanced alcoholic. Despite being cool, victims of this disorder begin to feel like their life is a meaningless, empty fraud for some reason.

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  Review by Anna Imhof 🌸 ★★★★★ 25

  I just cannot get over how much I love The Swimmer.

  Especially the opening.

  I remember seeing it for the first time. I could sense that I was in for something special. I just knew I was about to fall madly in love.

  The fluidity of that camera!

  The lightness of Lancaster’s step that stands in juxtaposition to the strength of his body. He’s old and young at once. There's something curious about his movements, like a boy who’s exploring the last summer of his childhood. A new day has begun, and it is begging to be discovered with all senses.

  But something’s looming over those woods, something in the air feels off, a darkness that's following him like the…

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★½

  Lying on my roof with a sniper rifle and taking out Burt Lancaster as he tries to climb over my fence to swim in my pool

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  Review by Sean Baker 13

  Such a fascinating film. Something so hypnotic about it. The sense of dread is present from minute one.

  The restoration looks fantastic.

  Want to seek out the documentary on the film. It's only on the Grindhouse releasing version:

  The Story of THE SWIMMER – brand new, five-part, 2-1/2 hour documentary by Oscar-winner Chris Innis featuring in-depth interviews with stars Janet Landgard, Joan Rivers and Marge Champion, composer Marvin Hamlisch, film editor Sidney Katz, assistant directors Michael Hertzberg and Ted Zachary, UCLA Olympic swim coach Bob Horn, and Joanna Lancaster

  Caught it on its final night on Criterion Channel

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  Review by Karsten ★★★★★

  kicking the summer off right

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  Review by KYK 3

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝 ★★★★ 4

  The Swimmer is a film often cited as being 'surreal', yet I've always thought that was a pretty easy catch-all term for a film that is actually not that surreal at all.

  It's strange, certainly, but I think that a lot about films made around this era. The late 1960s are a period of film that fascinate me, caught in a semi-limbo between Hays Code restrictions and straining at the leash to portray something more adult and free. The Swimmer feels like that too - sexually expressive but not explicit, taboo teasing but never baiting. It's an odd film that, arguably, fits its time better than it would fit any other time in cinema history.

  Any semblance of surreality here…

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★½ 11

  Strange, entrancing, altogether unnecessary adaptation of the Cheever short story that somehow absorbs the same anxious, high-art energy coursing through 2001, Rosemary's Baby, Once Upon a Time in the West, and other '68 Hollywood-esque product teetering on the edge of a revolution. Burt Lancaster, who was 55 and afraid of the water when he began shooting, has an impossible human form, a body that is no longer possible in this century, at once all mass and tensile power but also evidently atrophying in real time. He's a barrel with skin stretched over it. Crazy good performance in a movie that wants to be a dream but feels more like a movie that wishes it were a dream. I like the…

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  Review by Jacob Knight ★★★★★ 3

  “I’m gonna swim my way home.”

  Crushingly melancholy takedown of bougie 60s suburbia, full of languid malaise as we tag along with a proto-Don Draper doing laps in neighbors’ pools, each visit delivering us a little closer to his awful truth. Nerve wracking in how the existential dread starts to set in, as the leathery lothario is revealed to be a delusional deadbeat, never able to fulfill the infinite promises he contains. Where has this been all my life?

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½ 5

  I've never read Cheever's original story, but the literary reference that kept popping into my head for this was Absalom! Absalom!, another work about intense psychological self-deception and its reflection of broader social decay. Where Faulkner attacked the unreconciled racial psychology of the postbellum South, The Swimmer tackles the eroding postwar American consensus. Ned, like Thomas Sutpen, is a man clinging to a rotted corpse, unwilling or able to acknowledge the collapse of his class and patriarchal supremacy as he longs for return to his desiccated home, long emptied of the children who fled it. Ingeniously directed to let slight oddities in framing and awkward beats start to multiply and derail things, genuinely close in spirit and form to latter-day Bunuel. With Medium Cool, perhaps the best '60s film about the '60s.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★ 3

  77/100

  Funny how your imagination will sometimes cling to stuff you invented. I first encountered this film's bizarre premise almost 20 years ago, back when I was compiling Time Out New York's weekly calendar of rep screenings; having grown up in suburbia, I pictured Lancaster there, hopping one fence after another along a single block, or maybe several. Never occurred to me that he'd be doing much more hiking (okay, "portaging") than actual swimming, or that the homes in question would mostly be wide-open estates practically in the middle of the wilderness. So it took me a while to shake off my false conception and recognize what The Swimmer is actually up to, which is far more daring and surreal…