Drugstore Cowboy Critic Reviews

Drugstore Cowboy is one of the best films in the long tradition of American outlaw road movies - a tradition that includes "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Badlands."Read the full review

Van Sant gives his material shape and an invigorating, syncopated style. It keeps coming at you in surprising, dazzling ways.Read the full review

Drugstore Cowboy, an electrifying movie without one misstep or one conventional moment. [11 Oct 1989]Read the full review

No previous drug-themed film has the honesty or originality of Gus Van Sant's drama Drugstore Cowboy.Read the full review

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]Read the full review

Neither federally admonishing nor irresponsibly romantic, Cowboy stays high without being highhanded.Read the full review

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.Read the full review

Though the picture by no means endorses drugs, and paints the junkie life as almost intolerably dull as well as destructive, it is a welcome relief from the mostly heavy-handed Hollywood pictures that tackle the subject. [05 Oct 1989]Read the full review

A daring movie in today's current climate - one likely to be remembered at year's end. [18 Oct 1989]Read the full review